Non Sucking YAML parser

Jonathan Peterson JPeterson at bmjgroup.com
Thu Sep 14 10:18:24 BST 2006


> 
> I don't find it controversial at all. Trying to capture data in XML 
> is stupid, XML is made for documents. Those are simply different use 
> cases ? try doing XHTML in YAML!

Alas, the boundary between 'document' and 'data' is often blurred. In some 
ways, the whole point of XML is to allow us to automatically convert data 
(what computers like) into documents (what people like) and vice versa. 
It's a great big excercise in having your cake and eating it, so it's not 
suprising that XML technologies tend towards bloat and complexity.

On the other hand it's cool that I can render a 'document' exactly as it 
will appear in print, have it fully editable through a WYSIWYG interface, 
and place on it the same data integrity and type restraints as an RDBMS 
makes available, and then, when I've got many such documents, I can query 
them with a query language considerably better than SQL (i.e. Xquery) to 
extract data from them.

And all for a massive cost in deploying unreliable first generation 
implementations of standards that are often incomplete themselves and too 
complex to fully implement anyway :-)





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