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XML jest święty

October 28th, 2004Programming, Web Standards10 comments

Zacząłem właśnie przeglądać układaną przez Joela Spolsky’ego listę najlepszych esejów o tworzeniu oprogramowania. Już widzę, że czytanie tego będzie dobrą rozrywką na wiele zimowych wieczorów. Na początek proponuję sprawdzić swoją przynależność kościoła wyznawców XML. Mała próbka tekstu:

Many attempts have been made to disguise unenlightened data and silently get it into the XML world. The most successful attempt so far is the base64/CDATA combo. It is often whispered that the CDATA backdoor only causes trouble, but it’s part of XML and XML is sacred.

Jakieś dwa lata temu dołączyłem do grona wyznawców. I chociaż dziś moja wiara nieco osłabła, to jest już za późno.

I will only use office suites supporting XML; I’ll get notified of changes using XML; I’ll use programming languages that incorporate XML; and soon, I’ll create my user interfaces in XML.

Jeśli chodzi o te interfejsy, to w moim przypadku nie żadne “soon”. Ale o swojej magisterce napiszę może innym razem.

Comments

  1. Zef Hemel

    Just out of interest, could you give me the scoop of your comments in English?

  2. Szafranek

    It’s nice to see you here! Yesterday I’ve come across your article and enjoyed it a lot. Here’s a rough translation of my blog entry:

    XML is holy

    I’ve just started to browse a list of best software essays, putted together by Joel Spolsky. It’s going to be a lot of good reading for many winter evenings. First, let’s check if we’re members of the Church of XML. Here’s a short teaser:

    [quote from your article]

    It’s about 2 years since I’ve become a follower. Altough my faith seems to be a bit weaker than before, it’s already too late for me.

    [second quote]

    Talking about interfaces, in my case it’s not “soon”. But my thesis is something I’d like to talk about later.

    [For your information: I’m an IT student and now I’m working on a thesis titled: “Using XML to create User Interfaces for internet applications”. I’m going to focus on XUL, XAML and Macromedia Flex. Yes, you can consider me a doomed follower of XML :)]

  3. Zef Hemel

  4. Zef Hemel

    Hmm, that was wrapped a bit strange. After the domain name it should say: /archives/2004/09/16/visible-xml-i- s-bad-xml

  5. Zef Hemel

    LOL, ok, and that without the space in between.

  6. Szafranek

    My script strips too long URLs, so layout is harder to break. Probably there’s some issue with the script.

    There are some good points in your article. But I didn’t choose XML to experiment with not because it’s human readable or “easy to type with texteditor” (it’s not). The Web proved that markup language works well as a tool to describe GUIs. I just want to see how it’s going to work with some more standard interfaces (I mean: more destkop-like and less webpage-like).

    Currently I’m digging into Mozilla’s XUL and it seems quite impresive to me. I think that now, when our destkop machines are fast enough to interpret and display XML GUIs, Mozilla has proved that it’s not bad at all to create desktop application’s interefaces in XML. And I don’t think that MS decided to create XAML just because of marketing department (maybe I’m wrong in that point ;) ).

    Thesis is a safe place to play with such technologies and to see by myself if they really work well. Better place than some commercial project.

    Of course there’s a “cool factor” too. We both may know, that XML is not much more than a buzzword. But the truth is that in my country (situation elsewhere is probably similar) software companies simply require programmers to know how to work with XML. So do I learn.

  7. Zef Hemel

    OK, good luck :)

  8. Kheru

    Hello i see you have a nice conversation. (if i make code/language errors, i’m sorry)
    But i have one basic question.
    If XML is all about storing some information in some way, do we need it with MySQL+PhP out there? I can’t think out of any purposes that XML will fit and MySQL’ll not.

    Szak could you give me a copy of FLEX?
    Ok take care Szafranek and Zef Hemel.

  9. Szafranek

    Hi Kheru, it’s been a while :).

    I don’t think if it is right to compare XML and a relational database, since they have different purposes. XML is about describing data, while database is about storing it.

    So I use the latter to store and retrive ie. articles on this site, but I can’t use it to describe user interface – but XML can do that job.

    Talking about Flex — it’s not public, but check your mail :).

  10. kheru

    Well :) i could use some short example about describing something with XML (and not storing anything)

    The funny thing is that when i read more about XML(for me it’s useless thing for now), i thing it’s some kind of funn and i like it more and more, but despite that i don’t know where to use it since there is php and mysql.

    As to your opinion about that XML is about describing data php can do the same.

    But on the other hand if XML is unuseless thing why Microsoft want’s it so much :)

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