5 entries tagged
xml
and
yaml
I'm awake at 05:00 unable to sleep and instead working on migrating the
working copy of my web site to my laptop so that I can eventually retire
my old desktop. One of the importunate thoughts bouncing about in my
sleep-deprived brain is something someone at work said about some
weirdos he'd heard of who actually (ab)use XML as some sort of
(standard) generalized mark-up language. This bizarre (to him)
concept involves one choosing a set of XML tags to express the structure
of the text (as if text could have structure!), which is ludicrous
because how would anyone be able to read it? One would have to use XSLT
to transform it in to HTML, so why not use HTML in the first place, eh?
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This is a continuation of my pointless musing about a hypothetical
alternative to XML called MU.
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Apologies to people reading this via LiveJournal's syndicated feed; a
combination of my software converting every header in to an RSS item and
LiveJournal duplicating each item every time I edited the title has
created a flurry of links to essays that I expect no-one but me has any
interest in anyway.
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A lot of people use XML to serialize data structures; with the XML
parsers bundled with many programming environments it is easier than
writing one's own parser. But XML was not designed with this in mind and
contains too many traps causzed by the mismatch between the XML object
model and that of your application. A text format designed expressly for
for the purpose (my favourite is YAML) would be more convenient
and safer.
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My website is maintained by a rather complex amalgamation of software,
accreted over generations. Having migrated it from my old desktop
lickity to my new(ish) PowerBook Ariel, I now want to migrate it
again to my new server Tranq (a Tranquil PC T2); this will allow me to use cron to keep
some parts up-to-date automatically.
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