5 entries tagged xml and yaml

Bizarre fantasies of an Extensible Mark-Up Language

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? Read more

MU part 3: More MUD

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. Read more

Why XML is bad for data serialization

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. Read more

Migrating my website workspace, part 1

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. Read more