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I don't see any problem with this XML that can't be easily overcome. The comment about GMT-offsetting the date is particularly pithy, Assuming the blog in que

by stblack 14y ago

I don't see any problem with this XML that can't be easily overcome. The comment about GMT-offsetting the date is particularly pithy, Assuming the blog in question isn't about ephemerides. By and large, blog posts have dates. If you desperately need an hour-offset from GMT, one might suggest this is your edge-case because, by and large, it doesn't matter. Count me among those who would argue that the omission of a schema is a blessing. I've wasted whole f*cking days of my life wrangling with so-called "non-amateur" XML. Invariably this was over-bloated XML with schemas that did nothing to help the discoverability and the processing of the data. Plain and simple, XML is over-spec'd and many data publishers, aided by their inflexible toolsets, pushed their XML beyond reason. Be careful what you wish for. I would take this XML, map-it, iterate it, done! End of story. I don't think there's much to complain about here.

masklinn 14y ago
> Count me among those who would argue that the omission of a schema is a blessing. TFA didn't ask for a schema, TFA asked for namespace declarations. Because they're kind-of necessary to parse namespaces with a namespace-aware XML parser. That's got 0 relation with a Schema. He only mentioned in passing because `content:encoded` and `excerpt:encoded` make very little sense... schema-wise (not "in an XML-Schema document"). > I would take this XML You can't "take this XML" because it's not XML. Once you know it's not XML you can "take this tag soup", shove it into a tagsoup library (maybe with some encoding-guessing beforehand) and hope things come out about right at the other end — with no insurance that this is the case, you're deep in GIGO land at this point — but you can't "take it and map it"
- obviouslygreen 14y ago
  As someone who has used BeautifulSoup very happily without considering its etymology... is "tag soup" an actual term or just a very apt description you're using? [edit: A quick search, which I should have conducted instead of posting this, shows this has at least been used before, and enough not to be deleted by Wikipedia editors for lack of notability. That's pretty funny.]
adamtaro 14y ago
Hi, TFA here. Masklinn is right: I didn't ask for a schema. I didn't ask for anything. I somehow expected well-formed XML in a directory full of .xml files. That's 90% of what the rant is about. I wasted a handful of fscking years of my life editing a significant international standard that used a peculiar dialect of W3C XML Schema. I know from schema over-design. I'm just talking about understanding the bare basics of xml and seeing that 'excerpt:encoded' might not convey what you think it means when set next to 'content:encoded'. And it indeed took less time to hack together a solution to extract the information I needed (yay sed!) than it did to write this quick rant. That's not the point. The point is that the hacks and work-arounds should have been unnecessary. It's passing the savings of having one careless dev on as a cost to countless others having to deal with the data downstream.

by stblack 14y ago

masklinn 14y ago

> Count me among those who would argue that the omission of a schema is a blessing. TFA didn't ask for a schema, TFA asked for namespace declarations. Because they're kind-of necessary to parse namespaces with a namespace-aware XML parser. That's got 0 relation with a Schema. He only mentioned in passing because `content:encoded` and `excerpt:encoded` make very little sense... schema-wise (not "in an XML-Schema document"). > I would take this XML You can't "take this XML" because it's not XML. Once you know it's not XML you can "take this tag soup", shove it into a tagsoup library (maybe with some encoding-guessing beforehand) and hope things come out about right at the other end — with no insurance that this is the case, you're deep in GIGO land at this point — but you can't "take it and map it"

obviouslygreen 14y ago
As someone who has used BeautifulSoup very happily without considering its etymology... is "tag soup" an actual term or just a very apt description you're using? [edit: A quick search, which I should have conducted instead of posting this, shows this has at least been used before, and enough not to be deleted by Wikipedia editors for lack of notability. That's pretty funny.]

adamtaro 14y ago

Hi, TFA here. Masklinn is right: I didn't ask for a schema. I didn't ask for anything. I somehow expected well-formed XML in a directory full of .xml files. That's 90% of what the rant is about. I wasted a handful of fscking years of my life editing a significant international standard that used a peculiar dialect of W3C XML Schema. I know from schema over-design. I'm just talking about understanding the bare basics of xml and seeing that 'excerpt:encoded' might not convey what you think it means when set next to 'content:encoded'. And it indeed took less time to hack together a solution to extract the information I needed (yay sed!) than it did to write this quick rant. That's not the point. The point is that the hacks and work-arounds should have been unnecessary. It's passing the savings of having one careless dev on as a cost to countless others having to deal with the data downstream.