[as-devel] XML (was: 1.8 ?)

Albert Dorofeev (albert@tigr.net)
Wed, 28 Jul 1999 22:05:07 +0200 

On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 11:06:21PM -0700, Ethan wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Steven Baker wrote:
> 
> >   The advantages of using XML are clear.  It is fast becoming a
> > standard, the next HTML DTD will be XML based, and many programs are
> > already using XML.
> 
> Very true.  While the current learning curve to write this stuff by hand 
> may seem steep (knowing HTML helps here), as XML becomes more common, it 
> should become less so.  There are, as Steven points out, lots of apps 
> that use it already, and more all the time, so there isn't a question of 
> XML's future popularity - it's already popular.

I have had some experience with the new stuff, technology,
rules, file formats etc. I suppose that while XML may be
gaining some popularity it is not quite as widespread as
HTML. As far as I understood XML is somewhat like HTML.
Now, why do those companies that produce HTML decoders keep
putting out new and new versions of their browsers and those
browsers keep crashing? Do you think it is really as easy
as snapping fingers? I have big reservations about *any*
new technology. I could use XML for a little applet, for
example, no big deal to rewrite it from scratch later.
But a window manager? No, I would not do it.

An altogether different thing is whether XML is *suitable*
for our purposes. Again, as far as I understand, XML was
directed at writing documents in the first place. I am not
quite sure that it will be any good for writing configuration
files. There are good new technologies that could easily
be used to improve *some* applications or whatever but there
is no one technology that is good for anything at all.

> >   Using XML also relieves us from having to code configuration parsing
> > ourselves, there are some XML libraries already.  What was once
> > gnome-xml (which is soon going to be officially libxml) is supposedly
> > a great place to start for XML coding, though I havent' explored the
> > API yet.
> 
> External libraries are evil. :)  One of AfterStep's greatest strengths, 
> IMO, lies in the number of non-basic-X-library dependencies it has - 
> zero.

I support this. Why on Earth would you want to include a yet
another library if even for image processing there is a specific
library in AS? I would like to point out the size issue as well.
XML library is probably rather big (just a wild guess) because
it was (probably) written as a general-purpose library. AS does
not need a general-purpose library, AS needs a "lean and mean"
library that does exactly one single thing - understands the
configuration files. No extras. You do not really want AS to be
able to read any random document written in XML, it was not 
intended to.

Tigr

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