Re: Are folks still actively using Xalan-J?

On 2/4/2022 9:42 AM, Gary Gregory wrote:
> Say what you will about XML, JSON is just reinventing the wheel. How 
> do you transform a JSON document into another JSON document or into a 
> PDF? With Jolt? Good luck. XML and XSLT, XML Schema, and on.
>
I quite agree. I understand why folks wanted an easier-to-parse, 
data-centered rather than document-centered, syntax. But the XML Data 
Model could easily handle JSON, so they *could* have stayed within the 
XML ecosystem and leveraged all our previous effort. The two should have 
been co-evolving rather than in direct competition. Instead the JSON 
folks were defensively dogmatic about "JSON isn't XML" and decided to 
repeat the evolution from scratch. Which has done them no favors; last I 
looked, they were still having trouble even agreeing upon a single path 
syntax (and were still unwilling to accept that ours might address their 
needs).

We *could* add JSON parser and generators to the XML space by defining a 
standard mapping between the two notations. The one thing I can think of 
that might be difficult is that JSON can express general graphs, not 
just trees, so a naive mapping would have some risk of unintended 
recursion. On the other hand, most JSON is a simple tree, and 
programs/stylesheets written with an awareness of that risk can either 
avoid provoking it or set a maximum-depth panic... It'd be a good 90/10 
solution while we consider whether there's a cleaner way to handle it. 
Not as robust as I'd like, but then again Parsed Entities present their 
own risk and are not as robust against recursion as I'd like.


-- 
   /_  My pronouns are he/him/his, though I answer
-/ _) to "(the) cat('s)" ... or anything, really.
   /   Please correct me if I get yours wrong.

() Plaintext Ribbon Campaign
/\ Stamp out HTML mail!