Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life
My life is, to me, ripe with frequent challenges, occasional successes, spontaneous laughter, adequate tears, and enough *life* to last me a lifetime. To you, however, it surely seems most pedestrian. And therefore, I recycle the name I used previously and call this my Notebooks of Daily Life. Daily, because it's everyday in nature, ordinary. These conglomeration of events that are my life are of interest to me because I live it, perhaps mildly so to those who are touched by it, and could only be of perverse, morbid curiosity to anyone else. Yet, I offer them here nonetheless. Make of them what you will, and perhaps you can learn from my mistakes.
Sinasohn.Net
| Home | Notebooks | Photos | ||
| Contact | Notable |
Family
|
Dad Rachel Jared Sara |
Scotty Daniel Harry |
Stan Sellam Doug |
Business
TechSynthesis
Roger Louis Sinasohn & Associates
Jared Goes to College
Fun
Uncle Roger's Classic Computers
The Vintage Computer Festival
Northern California Rover Club
Atari Bay Area Computer Users Society
iStockPhoto (My portfolio)
Listology
Recent Comments
Tip: Cloning Toys [1]
March Challenge: Backup! [4]
All Caught Up [2]
February Challenge Complete! [4]
He'll Cut You [3]
|
An RSS Feed is also available.
Add it to your My Yahoo page.
|
Member of SF Bay Bloggers |
powered by blosxom |
Monday, February 28, 2005
I once worked on a project where the end result of my efforts was to be data written in XML format. For those unfamiliar with it, XML is a way to store data along with a description of what that data is. If you are at all familiar with HTML, XML looks very similar, with beginning and ending tags that both delineate and identify the data. My conclusion by the time that project was cancelled, was that XML was stupid.
Stupid in the context of Cobol, anyway. Cobol, you see, requires data to be defined in advance. This enforces the idea of designing the program around the data, rather than the other way 'round. XML isn't like that. XML allows for fields to be included -- or not -- as needed, in any order, of varying lengths.
Cobol can handle that sort of thing, but it's a ton of work for very little reward, especially when both sides of the communication are being written together. For the project we were working on, it was insane. What we ended up with was a fixed length, fixed format record, with XML tags tossed in for extra overhead.
I have, however, encountered a context in which XML makes a lot of sense. In Perl, XML can be parsed using regular expressions. I have been working with them a fair bit as of late, and am sold on their power and utility. With these at your disposal, and especially when communicating with applications written by someone else.
So, like anything, in some situations, XML is an incredibly stupid idea and yet, it can be very useful, in the right context.
| [ Posted: 16:00 | home | print ] |