The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

John Munsh: Here’s the thing. One thing used to grind me to a halt when it came to certain types of programs in the old days. PARSING. I hated building anything that parsed and I still do. XML took 90% of that away so I don’t have to worry about it, it’s a lingua franca that applications can speak and humans (barely) can as well if they need to. Once XML came along I started being able to use low level tools like DOM and SAX to address my parsing needs and now there are lots of excellent high level tools like JiBX, Digester, etc. which with some simple instruction about the structure of a document will go directly from the XML to fully populated objects in structures or collections. I’d rather have the power to not waste time on the parsing and devote that instead to the programs functionality and user interface. And you must remember, that your needs are just for a couple of quote characters to be allowed. For someone else it will be allowing a stray ampersand, for another it will be allowing a high bit character (em-dash, open quote/close quote, etc.) into a document marked UTF-8. Once you allow for _all_ the odd little exceptions, the parser can turn out to be quite a nightmare indeed.

Randy: John says XML is about never having to worry about parsing. Parsing is solved. XML solved it. I agree.

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