Re: XML support in E

On Jan 12, 2010, at 18:11, Kevin Reid wrote:

> On Jan 12, 2010, at 17:34, Mark Miller wrote:
>
>> I have become ever more attracted to JsonML <http://jsonml.org/> as
>> a way to handle XML data. Since E's term trees already handle JSON,
>> I suggest using the JsonML mapping of XML data into JSON structures.
>> I suggest we would then have no need for an XML quasi-parser. We
>> could just use the term tree quasiparser in quasi-JsonML format, to
>> manipulate XML trees as translated to JsonML structures. Even for
>> text markup, which is the best case for the XML vs JsonML
>> comparison, I still find JsonML notation more readable than XML.
>
> Against JsonML:
>
> * I do not see a specification for JsonML; not even as much of one as
> JSON started with.
>
> * It does not appear to have any handling of XML namespaces; this is
> fatal. The programmer must not be required to manually manage prefix
> declarations inside of XML tree-composing code or they will get it
> wrong (or have to think hard about issues that the software could be
> handling for them).

I hereby retract the first of these statements: I failed to scroll  
down on the main page and find the grammar.

Regarding XML namespaces, jsonml.org states *exactly the wrong* thing  
(for an in-memory XML representation), requiring programmers to work  
with declaring namespace prefixes as I mentioned before:

> XML Namespaces
> JsonML supports namespaces the same way that namespaces were handled  
> in XML 1.0. The element name is a concatenation of the namespace  
> prefix, the colon ':' character, and the element local-name.

-- 
Kevin Reid                                  <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>