XML is irrelevant -> was RE: XML consideration. [Was Re: a few short notes]

>There are many XML parsers out there.

XML is irrelevant to mail-ng!

At this point we are supposed to be looking at requirements.  XML is an
encoding mechanism, one of many that would work just as well as XML.
Even if XML is eventually adopted as an 'ng' encoding mechanism, there
is no purpose at all in discussing the benefits of XML on this mailing
list.

Paul




-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Hector Santos
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 1:44 AM
To: Iljitsch van Beijnum; Paul Robinson
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: 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