• From: Gareth Oakes <goakes@g...>
• To: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2013 15:48:23 -0800

On 10/12/2013 8:08 am, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...> wrote:

>I hate to interrupt this episode of "other programmers are so stupid,"
>but this story does its best to shove blame in a lot of unwarranted
>directions without recognizing that the rest of the world may have a
>point.

I think you might have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. I don't posit
that other programmers are stupid. I don't posit that XML and regex's are
dumb. My anecdote is only that, based on real life observations, and I am
purposefully not applying any form of judgment.


>While yes, it's true that XML didn't end up supporting the DPH fully -
>see <http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.perl.html> - the behavior you
>complain about was (and often is) seen as a feature, not a bug.

Sorry if you interpreted that way, but I wasn't complaining about anything.

>I don't find too many programmers who've written their own XML parsers
>out of stacks of custom regexes.

You may be hanging in different circles than myself, but it is not
uncommon that I come across this type of thing.

>(I manipulate markup with regular expressions pretty frequently, though
>in contexts unlikely to create explosions.)

Agree with this. Take the shortest path to a goal :)

>Yes, it's true that writing applications that apply regular expressions
>or other text processing to "complete" XML can be dangerous.  That
>doesn't mean that people doing that are stupid or poorly trained,
>however, and neither does it mean that they haven't tried their local
>XML toolsets first and found them wanting.
>
>RTFM is not the answer to XML's problems.  Neither is demanding smarter
>programmers.

If we are looking at "solutions" to tricky XML systems, there are two ways
I think about this:
1. Make data manipulation so easy, that it is a better alternative than
string manipulation. (eg. APIs? xmlsh?)
2. Make the data format so easy that regex or simple string functions work
without surprises. (eg. MicroXML?)

-Gareth

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Parsing XML with anything but
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>