Re: XML libs (was Re: gconf backend)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, 2003-09-27 at 15:35, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>    Let me take an example. We use GNOME, on X-Windows, usually on a
> local station or from a box on the LAN. Well we could trimm down the
> TCP support and get X to attack at the UDP and have interesting performances
> and lightweight RTT latencies. And we nearly never have really an use
> for full TCP when running GNOME applications. Still we use TCP, even
> on the local host. To me the parallel with XML subset versus full XML
> is similar. There is a time were you forget about the implementation detail
> of a comodity layer and just use What's There.

The problem is that to do this we have to make apps Just Work without
having to understand XML in detail, just as I can write network code
while having zero understanding of the TCP stack. TCP is just a byte
stream to me. In the same way XML should just be a tree of elements,
attributes, and content with some doctype; deriving from some single
block of bytes the app obtained standalone. At least, for the apps I'm
writing that's my experience.

If someone has to understand XML in detail to write a compliant app,
they almost certainly won't write a compliant app, because the XML spec
is huge. It is probably a failing of the XML specification that it is
too hard to write a compliant app and that compliance seems to require
doing things that don't always make sense, like handling multiple files.

I agree that there's huge value to having files that can be manipulated
by standard tools, at the same time full XML compliance seems pretty
much impossible for anything short of a web browser.

I don't know what to do about that; in the meantime I just use the
simplest possible solution for each situation and hope someone smarter
will fix the problem.

> <note> I would love to see the system tray implementation debugged and
> integrated as maintained APIs in the toolkits for example ;-) </note>

As would I, unfortunately the spec and implementation are both totally
screwed up. ;-)

> <note> www.freedesktop.org state "Welcome to freedesktop.org" , but
> freedesktop.org doesn't seem to exist in the DNS </note>

State of transition, it will all kick over to pdx.freedesktop.org soon.

Havoc