> On /. today there is a discussion about a weblog entry by an XML
> co-creator about how XML is 'irritating, time-consuming, and error-prone'.
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/18/0712248&mode=thread&tid=95&tid=156

What I got from Bray's blog entry was that XML programming was hard for certain developers using certain languages. The problems
seems to be the language and what APIs it offers, not XML per se.  XML programming hard for Java developers? Wow. Who'da thunk?

>
> Seems to me that the Ruby community has adopted YAML (http://www.yaml.org)
> more quickly than many other programming communities, which is why I'm
> posting this here (I suppose it's because we tend to be early adopters,
> but that's a tangent).  It also seems to me that YAML solves a
> lot of these XML problems.  Anyway, this seems like a good opportunity for
> YAML.

Odd you see this as an opportunity for YAML; I see this as an opportunity for Ruby.

Ruby makes XML programming is really easy, in large part thanks to REXML, but also because of the dynamic typing and clean OO design
of Ruby.

(It would be killer if Ruby also supported more standard XML APIs as well, but then Ruby would overtake all other languages and be
destroyed by its own success :) )

At the end of Bray's blog entry he mentions that his list of languages (it did not include Ruby, which I suspect it knows little
about) need better support for XML stream processing.

REXML offers that in a nice API.

YAML has its place, though personally I haven't had a need for a statically-typed markup language (and I admit I still haven't
managed to finish reading the spec). But it can't (so far, at least) stand in for XML; comparisons between the two are apples and
oranges.

I'm puzzled, too, by claims of large YAML popularity in the Ruby community.
There appears to be a core group here that make regular posts on YAML, and of course anytime the string "XML" appears in a message a
mailbot sends an autopost follow-up message urging the use of YAML.  ;)  But beyond that, I don't know.

Just to make another apples-to-oranges comparison, there are a good number of Ruby apps/libs that use XML in some way:

http://www.rubyxml.com/raa/details.html (somewhat out of date, so take with a grain of salt.)

Any idea what number of apps or libs use YAML?

Do such comparisons mean anything?

James



>
> Phil
>