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Writing proper XML tools is very difficult. XMLs are usually parsed without considering the dtd. It seems the dtds are just for humans to read. As you mention,
by blablabla123 10y ago
Writing proper XML tools is very difficult. XMLs are usually parsed without considering the dtd. It seems the dtds are just for humans to read. As you mention, XML becomes more interesting with extensibility. IMHO XSLT is the key technology for that but unfortunately there is no reasonable support for XSLT 2 because the standard is just too complex. And XSLT 1 is barely interesting to use.
By the way, there's SLAX, it's isomorphic to XSLT but with nicer syntax. Nice approach but anyways, the standards are horribly complex and stiff.
- acdha 10y agoThe main lesson I've learned from this is that a spec is far more likely to be successful if it's paired with at least one working implementation and more than trivial test data. Writing a validator is both important for adoption and perhaps more so for flushing out parts of the spec which are too hard to implement or annoying to work with.