World: r3wp

in the moment i play a little bit with xml-parse.r, it has a lot 
of things done, some are still open (like  <!ENTITY ...> parsing) 
and it is like SAX - I try to implement some handlers to learn REBOL, 
but it's still in progess. A benefit of xml-parse is, that there 
would be only one parser and some kind of standard API and the handler 
could then generate rebxml or some other desired format

DOM: in java APIs there were allways problems with dom - big amount 
of memory, not optimized for a language, so there was a need for 
optimized tools like JDOM, XOM or DOM4J, they all prefer SAX for 
parsing and have their own internal model - of course the API is 
special for all these tools and no standard like DOM

I guess in rebol we have fewer problems than java, as rebol is dynamic 
and java has to emulate that? So it cant map its own classes because 
the format is not known at compile-time? While we can. And then xml 
in memory should be in the order of rebol-blocks?

out of the blue, can anyone point me to the (or one) official XML 
spec ? (if there are many, it should be the one most used on windows 
and in things like PHP)

thanks!

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/

thanks Chris !

will be reading top to bottom ...  not that this is any fun...  ;-)

Has somebody already give a try to a SAX implementation ?

http://tech.motion-twin.com/xmllight.html

xml is such bloat.. I am parsing xml these days and for two characters 
of data, I often have a 100+ characters of nested stupidity.

an empiric test (subjective to the xml structure and tag names obviously, 
but this IS a real world xml file)

693 kb in xml form   ==>  90 kb  in nested rebol blocks

I left the tabs at 2 spaces in the rebol output, so that the comparison 
is fair.

no need to convince us :-)

Agreed.  So, write a Rebol block ML that does everything as well 
as XML, and we will support it.

manual resync...

my god reading the w3c spec for XML is insane.

XML overcomplicates soooo many things.  its like the standard, for 
people who can't make up their minds:


You can do this, or that or this too, but only when this and that 
or this occur outside and inside that other thing.

XML was intended to be a simplification of SGML.

But they forgot to ask first "why is SGML apparently some complicated?"

So they ended up adding back in most of the complications in an ad 
hoc way.

XML was a simple 2 page spec originally.

I think that might be why the microformats are taking off. They  
use XML in its simplest, intended form.

I'm on a list discussing, inter alia, CCR .. which stands for continuity 
of care record. It's XML, and so guys are saying it's taken them 
50,000 lines to write the parsing code etc.

Possibly an exaggeration on their part.

I think not, Graham .... we have such a problem ... big corporation, 
we try to define xml formats. The trouble is, big products do wrap 
it for you, but what about smaller companies?

not to mention browser incompatibilities, because in the case of 
XML, browser is your "preview" interface ...

If you need a simple XML spec, don't forget my RebXML: http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/rebxml/
(Only a couple of pages.)

It's an easy way to work with XML inside REBOL, and on the same page 
you'll find scripts for converting between XML and RebXML.

I think that current situation of XML world shows, that it is rather 
absurd situation .... the idea of automatic exchange of docs, their 
specs, without involvement of ppl, is naive ....

I remember talk a few years ago, that MS would make their .doc format 
XML based. And people thought, that would mean, it would become an 
'open' format, which could now be read and written by any wordprocessor. 
If you have somehing like:
#{78797A7138373837}
in binary, and choose to make it into XML:
<xyzq>8787</xyzq>

does that make you know, what it mean? No, of course not. Some MS 
employee later told in an interview, that MS of course would guard 
their IP - 'intellectual property'. I don't know, where the story 
ended, and I don't care much, as I keep away from MS formats.

If you choose to have your doc formats in something like the XML-based 
OpenDocument, where every tag is explained in an open specification, 
then it can be used. (Only problem then is XML itself with it's problems.)

saved out a 15 cell spread sheet in microsoft xml yesterday...  58kb 
of data HAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

geomol, does RebXML handle namespaces and unicode?

Geomol, just looked over rebxml...  I've build a similar engine, 
even simpler actually.  but it might become a little bit smarter 
in a few weeks... maybe supporting more of the XML 1.0 specs like 
&chars conversion and such.

maxim - have you used Gawain's xml parser, or is it your own one?

my own  when I started the project I did not have many days to "get 
on with it" and for various reasons all the tools I tried didn't 
properly load the specification I was trying to load.

but there where some errors in the datafile itself, in the begining.

it had to do with http dowloading of the chunks...

my tool currenctly loads 1MB of xml tags in under a second.  its 
almost as fast as load/markup.

yet builds a nested block of blocks much like RebXML.

does it work SAX way or DOM way? I mean - load first, then parse, 
or parse while reading way?

it does all in one shot.  I read through the string once and have 
a nifty recursion with tail handling.

I want to try out with rebcode one day.  it would probably go about 
10 times faster or more.

hmm, I think that our problem is not lack of speed, but lack of fully 
compliant xml parser at first....

yep.

reading the xml spec... its no wonder.

no wonder what?

pekr: no wonder there's still no fully compliant xml parser

my god reading the w3c spec for XML is insane.
 LOL

I always thought the c in W3c meant committee not consortium.  ;-)

Maxim yes, RebXML can handle namespace tags and unicode.

Geomol,  you might just have made yourself a new user :-)  I'll try 
to stress-test RebXML next week, gauging speed, features and stability.