What does XML look like on other planets?

Beats me. But I have seen what XML looks like in the alternative reality cubicle of my strange friend Gaksloope, fourteen minutes into the future.

Compare Gaksloope's XML side by side with some regular Earth XML.

How many differences can you detect? And what are they all about?

'Itai' on Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:19:12 GMT, sez:

Looks like Gaksloope's XML is shorter and easier to write by hand, but I suspect his parser needs to work a little harder...
I assume that in GAXML, slash characters need to be entered as &sl; entities?

'Jeff' on Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:07:43 GMT, sez:

How come the url has back slashes in it? Very "Microsoft"

Sometimes the closing tags specify the name of the tag and sometimes they don't. It seems to be that on multi-line values they specify the name of the closing tag. This 'optional' business would make it harder to parse -- both with a parser, and using the naked eye.

'Jeff' on Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:15:46 GMT, sez:

Also -- in Gaksloops world, they use aspx? the W3c recommends not including the file extension in a URL ()
maybe it should just be:
ht:\\org\gaksloope\www\blog\nancy

or better:
ht:\\org\gaksloope\www\blog\2006\02\nancy

which would be valid for one hundred years!

'leon' on Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:53:33 GMT, sez:

Yes i've forwarded some of these questions to G, and others I've asked before.

It's optional to specify the name of the closing tag -- the parsers are very slightly more difficult to write as a result, but no slower to execute.

Good guess, Mr Toad Balancing, '&sl;' is used for a slash, though there are less of them, because they aren't used in addressing: this isn't a microsoft thing either. That's how Linux works too (...in Gak's world).

Apparently "-" was used for parameter prefixes, in systems that predate folders. And "\" was chosen over "/" as a folder separator because it's used less often in written english, and needs to be escaped less often.

cheers
lb

'ancow' on Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:58:25 GMT, sez:

There are only two thirds as many character's indicating the beginning or end of a tag.

There are half the number of angle bracket characters, and less redundant text to compare.

I think the parsers would benefit and run faster: if a closing tag is empty, then they don't have to do a string comparison to determine is the name of the closing tag is what was expected... they just move on.

'Farmer Jeb' on Thu, 09 Feb 2006 02:21:37 GMT, sez:

Uuh, guys... what about the fact that Nancy has changed her answer to 'Yes'? Typical programmers - can't see the data for the code!

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