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adamtaro

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A brief XML rant 13 years ago

It's a pretty new redesign. I use Chrome myself, but shoot me a screenshot? hello at article_domain

A brief XML rant 13 years 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.

A brief XML rant 13 years ago

Agreed on your stipulation on Genshi and the like.

And thanks for the further reverse engineering of the likely intent of the export. I wouldn't disagree with most of the WP-centric design choices. But attempting to run through a real XML parser might've been a good choice as well. (And I note there's a fair bit of complaint on the WP forums about the difficulty of using the data for import.)

A brief XML rant 13 years ago

It was not intended as a criticism of XML at all. XML is a perfectly cromulent standard. It is a criticism of amateurish use of XML.