102 posts tagged “xml”
2008
Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format. Open sourced today. Highly efficient binary protocol for storing and transmitting structured data between C++, Java and Python. Uses a .proto file describing the data structure which is compiled to classes in those languages for serializing and deserializing. 3-10 times smaller and 20-100 times faster than XML.
XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text. Argh! I mean, come on, it's that easy. But you know, there's a big debate about it.
Draconian failure on error is not the answer problems of Postel's law. Draconian error handling creates an unstable equilibrium in Game Theory terms - it only lasts until one player breaks the rule. One non-Draconian XML5 implementation in key client product and the Draconian XML ranks would break. Well-specified error recovery is the right way to implement the liberal part of Postel's law.
CouchDB, XML, and E4X. Brilliant—CouchDB now enables SpiderMonkey’s E4X support, meaning CouchDB views can easily query XML documents stored inside JSON objects using E4X syntax.
PrinceXML is extremely impressive. I had a poke at Prince (a commercial package for generating high quality PDFs from HTML, XML, CSS and SVG) a few weeks ago and was similarly impressed.
Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest (via) “Firefox 3 implements the W3C Access Control working draft, which gives you the ability to do XMLHttpRequests to other web sites”—you can mark a document as available for cross-domain requests using either an Access-Control HTTP header or an XML processing instruction.
2007
PostgreSQL 8.3 beta 4 release notes. In addition to the huge speed improvements, 8.3 adds support for XML, UUID and ENUM data types and brings full text (tsearch2) in to the core database engine.
[Release] CouchDB 0.7.0. This is a huge milestone for the project—it’s the first official release to include the JSON REST API instead of XML, and it’s also the first release that is “intended for widespread use”.
The larger question is why on earth, in 2007 and ten years after XML came out, we are still using text files that don't label their encoding?
Atom Models. Building Python classes that act as utility wrappers around data stored in an lxml DOM object.
=drummond XRDS. Bookmarked so I can remember how to easily resolve someone’s i-name.
Introduction and Yahoo! Pipes. The official Google Maps API blog describes how to plot KML output from Yahoo! Pipes.
XML and JSON. James Clark on JSON’s strengths and weaknesses compared to XML.
A binary compatible wire call is still a binary compatible wire call, no matter how much XML you put on it.
Highrise Forum: Using the undocumented API. Add .xml to the end of many URLs in Highrise to get an XML representation of that page.
json-taglib. Because JSON just doesn’t have enough angle brackets.
Introducing RDFa. A way of representing RDF triples in XML that doesn’t suck.
XForms in Firefox (via) Practical tutorial on taking advantage of the Firefox XForms plugin, sadly not yet bundled with the browser itself.
Which is the real explanation of where the name XMLHTTP comes from- the thing is mostly about HTTP and doesn't have any specific tie to XML other than that was the easiest excuse for shipping it so I needed to cram XML into the name (plus- XML was the hot technology at the time and it seemed like some good marketing for the component).
Apache Solr 1.1. Solr is the search Web Service built on top of Lucene. The latest release introduces JSON, Python and Ruby response formats in addition to XML.
2006
Seems easy to me; if you want to serialize a data structure that’s not too text-heavy and all you want is for the receiver to get the same data structure with minimal effort, and you trust the other end to get the i18n right, JSON is hunky-dory.
— Tim Bray
Why JSON isn’t just for JavaScript
Dave Winer’s discovery of JSON (and shock that “it’s not even XML”) has triggered an interesting discussion thread, on his blog and elsewhere. Plenty of people have re-assured him (and themselves) that it’s only used for JavaScript—it’s convenient in the browser but irrelevant elsewhere.
[... 787 words]I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can't be that hard to parse, so let's see what it looks like, and damn, IT'S NOT EVEN XML! [...] Who did this travesty? Let's find a tree and string them up. Now.
PHP, XML, and Character Encodings. This caught me out earlier today.
Parsing XML can open network sockets (via) Yikes. Something to bare in mind.
Thinking XML: Good advice for creating XML (via) Uche Ogbuji’s commentary on the Bozo HOWTO.
HOWTO Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML. Excellent advice, particularly around character encoding.
2005
Microsoft Team RSS Blog : Feeds and well-formed XML (via) Wow. IE7 will require RSS feeds to be well-formed XML.
2004
Where XML goes astray (via) XML’s weaknesses discussed.