Kent Starr, elderburn / mindspring.com 
> It can also be thought of a a meta-language, in that, with XML you define 
> customized tags and ...
> ...then we can exchange even 
> highly customized data unique to our respective needs

The huge cost of this is performance, the other is that XML has some really
wierd constructs that are not easily parsed.  OTOH, most OO languages use the
same complex sturcture map, perl is wider in that it allows a mixing of arrays
and hashes.

XML has a lot of stuff borrowed from the HTML family which has no place except
in browser documents.  XML proponents would have you build your dataservers to
their constructs, a headache nobody needs.

All this data interchange stuff is nice but the only really useful application
of XML is to the browser itself.  Forget DTDs, all you need is a CSS file to
give the rendering instructions to your specific markup tags.  As much sense as
this makes, damn little CSS is actually appears in browsers and none of it
accomodates XML markup (so far).

Personaly, I would just stick to a handful of languages and parse complex
structures between them, assuming they have the same level of complex structure
complexity.  My ideal is to be able to serialize and emit complex data
stuctures including anonymous methods as well as machine code to remote
receivers.

John




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John van Vlaanderen

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