Re: a few short notes

At 08:16 03/02/2004, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>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.

I couldn't agree more. I wrote a basic XML parser which could do just what 
we needed and no more and it was 259 lines long (that's not counting the 
STL libraries it used). This built up a tree structure of the XML. There 
was even more code to grab the particular XML element I wanted from that 
tree structure. I can't see how you could do it in 12 lines apart from just 
to find a specific tag value.

OTOH, my RFC822 header email-address-aware parser is only 220 lines long. 
(If I didn't need to parse email addresses it would be MUCH shorter). A 
parser for a better designed plain text metadata format could easily be in 
the region of 50 lines or less.

I don't like RFC822 headers, but I think there are simpler alternatives to 
XML which I'd prefer. I wouldn't die if it did turn out to be XML, but I'd 
like a good reason rather than 'it's the new way of doing things'.


Paul				VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
[email protected]			http://www.pscs.co.uk/