[REBOL] Re: XML / dialects
From: brett:codeconscious at: 8-Jan-2002 21:44
First off, thank you everyone for some very good reading on this thread. It
has certainly branched and grown in quite a vew interesting directions.
Especially Gavin's heads up on hand-coded parsers. I enjoyed the article
references too.
Maybe though I should have put the subject line as Dialects / XML (order is
significant)?
I'm curious about the ways that information, delivered by XML, can be
expressed in Rebol. Also about any useful things that can be done to
automate this work. Whether Rebol dialects can be automatically, even if
partially, created to mimic/equate/simulate/... the domain specific language
that the XML is encoding. Maybe XMLSchemas/DTDs/RelaxNGs/etc.. need to be
read into Rebol forms. I don't know, I'm just speculating, wondering out
loud and possibly but unintentionally just making a nuissance of myself.
Putting it another way, it is hard enough to learn a domain specific
language. I feel that it is too hard to have to do that *and* process it in
terms of another language (XML) just because that is the "transport". XML is
at a different "semantic level". I'd like the XML encoding to be transparent
to me so that I can code in the terms of the domain specific language
as easily as I code VID.
Actually VID is an interesting example. What would it look like as XML? How
would we write a program to interpret an XML-VID and build a GUI directly?
Maybe someone should encode a VID layout as an XML document (not to forget
building a DTD or whatever). Then we convince some ambitious soul to make a
program to interpret such a document via an XML parser, and build a working
GUI directly. Then we can sit back and say "Ah good job dude. You've used
state of the art technology and current thinking to produce that display.
But couldn't you do it in one line rather than pages of code?". But that
would be too cruel.. :)
Brett.
