Non Sucking YAML parser

[Dirk Koopman]

On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 10:21 +0100, Jonathan Stowe wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 11:02 +0200, Robin Berjon wrote:
> > On Sep 13, 2006, at 20:15, Jonathan Stowe wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 18:24 +0200, Robin Berjon wrote:
> > >> Is there a pointer to that talk?
> > >
> > >  Er, you had to be there, I got taken by the drink when I had  
> > > planned to
> > > be writing more detailed slides ;-)
> > >
> > > I'll be doing a more complete paper on the subject soon so the talk  
> > > will
> > > be repeatable. The existing slides which are little more than a  
> > > capsule
> > > summary are at http://www.its-going-to-be-fabulous.com/talk_2006.pdf
> > 
> > Oh it's just saying that Web Services suck, not XML. That's perfectly  
> > fine in my book :)
> > 
> 
> No I've never been in the YAML, JSON, <serialization format du jour>
> fanboy camp. XML parsing can be a pain sometimes but it's way less of a
> pain than trying to persuade a software vendor to support some
> fashionable data serialization scheme they've never heard of.

There are two issues here:

1. Public interfaces. Although I hate XML with a passion (especially
when someone is being verbose and insists that you are as well), I can
see its utility - at least for "occasional" low bandwidth usage (say
below 5 requests/sec).

2. Protocols. Here XML is a pain. It doesn't stream without kicking or
otherwise fooling the parser into thinking that each "paragraph" is,
fact, a "document". This is compounded by the fact that most people who
use XML for protocols insist on sending all the descriptive stuff
(DOCTYPE, xmlns etc etc) on each paragraph. They also tend to use huge
tagnames and don't factorise. Hence my jibes about signal/noise ratios.

Dirk