Uche Ogbuji wrote: > I certainly have never liked the aspects of the ElementTree API under > present discussion. But that's not as important as the fact that I > think the above statement is misleading. There has always been a > battle in XML between the people who think the serialization is > preeminent, and those who believe some data model is preeminent, but > the reality is that XML 1.0 (an 1.1) is a spec *defined* by its > serialization.
sure, the computing world is and has always been full of people who want the simplest thing to look a lot harder than it actually is. after all, *they* spent lots of time reading all the specifications, they've bought all the books, and went to all the seminars, so it's simply not fair when others are cheating. in reality, *all* interchange formats are easier to understand and use if you focus on a (complete or intentionally simplified) data model of the things being interchanged, and treat various artifacts of the byte-stream used by the wire format as artifacts, historical accidents based on what specification happened to be written before the other, or what some guy did or did not do in the seventies, as accidents, and esoteric arcana disseminated on limited-distribution mailing lists as about as relevant for your customer as last week's episode of American Idol. (XML is a bit unusual in this respect, but that's probably just some variation of the bikeshed effect. it's just text, and everyone with a keyboard knows what that is, so we don't need to use established software engineering practices, or think about security *at all* (Billion laughs? XXE?) or, for that matter, learn from people who's been doing data interchange in other domains since the dawn of time. and when they do appear anyway, and mess with our technology in ways that we haven't authorized, without reading our books or going to our seminars or subscribing to our mailing lists, we can write them off as "clueless muppet teenage genius code-jockeys", and keep patting our- selves on the back, while the rest of the world is busy routing around us, switching to well-understood XML subsets or other serialization formats, simpler and more flexible data models, simpler API:s, and more robust code. and Python ;-) </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
