XML document formats?

Hi, just trying to find out, if anyone works in the industry, where you use some standard XML document formats as invoices, orders, etc.? XML may get pretty complex, and maybe I could use some templates for that purpose? Does anyone have any pointers? I will try to look at OASIS consortium, but not sure I will find something :-) thanks :-) -pekr-

Petr, Talking about XML, how do you use REBOL to parse XML docs? I have tried once but found that too much complicated. By the way blocks are much easier to use than XML nodes 2006/3/22, Petr Krenzelok <petr.krenzelok-trz.cz>:

> Hi, > just trying to find out, if anyone works in the industry, where you use > To unsubscribe from the list, just send an email to > lists at rebol.com with unsubscribe as the subject.

Hi, I'm on the Danish implementation of UBL - working on the current UBL 2.0 implementation. On 3/22/06, Petr Krenzelok <petr.krenzelok-trz.cz> wrote:

Petr Krenzelok wrote:

> Hi, > just trying to find out, if anyone works in the industry, where you use > thanks :-) > -pekr-

Carlos Lorenz wrote:

> Petr, > > Talking about XML, how do you use REBOL to parse XML docs? I have tried once > but found that too much complicated. By the way blocks are much easier to > use than XML nodes >

bryan rasmussen wrote:

> Hi, > I'm on the Danish implementation of UBL - working on the current UBL > 2.0 implementation. >

Rebol's XML support is pretty bad. Gavin's implementation is not really adequate considering that most people used to working with XML are used to dealing with a stack of technologies, none of which are implemented. Aside from that I seem to recall that it did not have a good implementation for Namespaces, and I don't recall but I seriously doubt there was any focus on some of the more ersatz bits of the spec like Attribute-Value Normalization http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#AVNormalize I would suggest the following: Rebol ships with support for the libxml project http://xmlsoft.org/ also libxslt http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT.html to make things complete. It has been my experience that these libraries are maintained to be cross-platform. Rebol still should contain the old rebol parsing of xml as a fallback, that is to say when XML is not well-formed the XML can still be accessed and manipulated as Rebol blocks. This will help in the building of applications where the XML is not data critical and not well formed documents can be fixed, or in building applications that do this kind of fixing. On 3/22/06, Petr Krenzelok <petr.krenzelok-trz.cz> wrote:

No I don't use Rebol in relation to XML (for the reasons outlined below), I don't really use the language any more but keep an eye on the list in case it gets support for things I want in which case I would be taking it back up of course (mostly Rebol for me fit in the position of a good network administration language, since I work mostly in standardization nowadays, and standardization of XML languages specifically there's not that much I have to use it for - this is not to take away from what others use it for of course). Well I work for the government organization that does the specification of the Danish implementation of UBL, basically decisions to use it have been political as most decisions of government standards must be - how much does one think the standard will improve, move forward etc. etc. As for the power of UBL, I would say that UBL 2.0 will be powerful enough to represent most things that most people want to do with ERP systems. Invoicing, Orders, Response Documents, Credit notes, etc. etc. Also, politically speaking there is some indication that it will be the business document standard in Scandinavia, Great Britain. Lots of Asian support, European support, etc. If I were you I would look at the Small Business Subset of UBL specifically, don't let the name fool you, it's not just for Small Businesses. Cheers, Bryan Rasmussen On 3/22/06, Petr Krenzelok <petr.krenzelok-trz.cz> wrote:

bryan rasmussen wrote:

> Rebol's XML support is pretty bad. Gavin's implementation is not > really adequate considering that most people used to working with XML > like Attribute-Value Normalization > http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#AVNormalize

> I would suggest the following: > > Rebol ships with support for the libxml project http://xmlsoft.org/ > also libxslt http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT.html to make things complete. It > has been my experience that these libraries are maintained to be > cross-platform. >

I wish that libxml and libxslt should be included into rebol to create native xml datatype. Wonder if XPath can be expressed in path! datatype but rebol does not have even unicode, so it is long way before it will be possible communicate with world outside rebol. Does anyone know if plugin framework for Rebol 3.0 will allow adding new datatypes to rebol? Karol

Karol Gozlinski wrote:

> I wish that libxml and libxslt should be included into rebol to create > native xml datatype. > Does anyone know if plugin framework for Rebol 3.0 > will allow adding new datatypes to rebol?

bryan rasmussen wrote:

> Rebol's XML support is pretty bad. Gavin's implementation is not > really adequate considering that most people used to working with XML > has been my experience that these libraries are maintained to be > cross-platform.

Xerces is another possibility, but I'm not as familiar with the Xerces C as I am with the Xerces Java, furthermore Xerces just gives you a parser, the Libxml project gives parser, schema languages support, XML Schema and Relax-NG etc. etc. As you noted before it seems complex, quite a bit of it is complex, and I believe needlessly so, some of it is set for a shaking out. I wonder somewhat if XML Schema will make it. But in the meantime XML Schema is necessary for anybody forced to deal with the horrors of SOAP, WS-I etc. Rebol is too far behind to hit any of these targets with the next release, but if a good library was included then there is enough code out there that could theoretically be leveraged to hit other targets. I mean even if Rebol came with a compliant XML parser at this point, that's too late. But if it came with Libxml and the non-compliant parse-xml as a fallback that's a big plus for certain developers. It would actually be a useful tool for me as an XML guy, and I can say that I am pretty skilled in various XML related technologies. someone asked about XPath being expressible as Path, do you mean would an XPath if queried for datatype return path? probably for simple ones, but here are some complex ones: /*[local-name()='document'] Return the document element (the first element encountered in the tree, the root element but technically not the root node, since the root node holds the document element as well) if the name of this element without namespace prefix is equal to document //p[-class]/a/-href return all attributes href on all a elements that are children of p elements that have an attribute class. I don't think these would return type path is queried in Rebol. Again I'd reiterate, the Libxml project implements not just many complex things, but many of the really useful technologies for working with XML, among which would be xpath, and relax-ng, a simpler than W3C XML Schema schema language. On 3/22/06, Petr Krenzelok <petr.krenzelok-trz.cz> wrote:

basically the difference is as expressed in the thread, what do you want to do, SAX is a streaming api therefore used for manipulating large documents, especially if you only want to extract data, the Dom reads the whole tree into memory. Thus there can be performance differences between these two. However there is another difference, that being that a lot of developers find SAX counter intuitive, and Dom not so counter intuitive. There's a saying somewhere: "SAX is too hard, Dom is too weak." However they are just two different API's, not the only ones out there. Rebol could have its own, if it had a XML and Namespaces conformant parser(everyone is namespace conformant nowadays) Xpath can be considered another API for getting at data in an XML document. Most DOM implementations allows you to to basically pass XPaths to get back a portion of the document that you then work with as shown in this article from Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/0900/xml/ I personally think XPath support is more essential than either of the other two, for example in .Net one makes a lot of use of XmlReaders, thus it can be shown that if someone has a better way it can work, but it must also be conformant (of course being from MS does not hurt): http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconReadingXMLWithXmlReader.asp A propos my suggestion for Libxml, then I would hope it would be possible to port libgdom http://gdome2.cs.unibo.it/ and thus have a dom implementation of course it should be noted that Libxml has partial implementations of both SAX and DOM in the core library, but these are not supposed to 100% conformant. Aside from all this, of the two DOM has higher mindshare, and it is a W3C specification. In the context of how a Rebol-ish XML api might work one could look at SXML, a scheme project http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/xml.html On 3/22/06, Petr Krenzelok <petr.krenzelok-trz.cz> wrote:

It should be noted that the libxml xml schema implementation is not very conformant, but one of the dirty facts of xml schema is there isn't a great deal of conformance in the implementations. On 3/22/06, bryan rasmussen <rasmussen.bryan-gmail.com> wrote: