XML consideration. [Was Re: a few short notes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <[email protected]>
To: "Paul Robinson" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 3:16 AM
Subject: Re: a few short notes


>
> I wrote a program in C that takes a Netscape bookmark file and stores
> the content in a database. This is just under 300 lines and it's pretty
> stupid, it certainly can't handle all variations of HTML.
>
> It could be lack of programming prowess on my part, but I find parsing
> HTML / XML syntax incredibly inconvenient. The most troubleshome part
> is that you can't just work left to right, you have to look for close
> tags and so on.
>
> Also, it just doesn't make any sense.
>
> Why is it <input type=blah> but <title>blah</title> ? Something like
> input="blah" title="blah" would be much better.
>

You raise a good point for simplicity,  but allowing the experts to offer
the tools for you to this better is the way to go about it.   :-)

I personally think XML can be used as a protocol/network control "wrapper"
for a data/format independent transport system.  I don't think it is
appropriate to use it for the MAIL data component itself for the basic
reason that it imposes presentation and data processing related issues.

As a side note:

There are many XML parsers out there.    Off hand, there is a public domain
light weight XML parser called PUGXML, very popular.  It is written for
portability using ANSI C/C++.   It is a single pugxml.h header file and it
has over 2500 lines of nicely written C++ class object code.   We are
starting to use it ourselves.   I'll be interested to know how this compiles
under a *nix system.   You can google PUGXML and find the header and
information about it.  The help file is written in Windows Help format, so I
don't know if that will help you.  The documentation is pretty good I think.

-- 
Hector Santos, Santronics Software, Inc.
http://www.santronics.com