Playing with XML is like playing with bees without any cover

Bea is moving toward putting XML where it belongs -- out of sight. Editors' Newswire for 27 January, 2003. Newswire stories, including: BEA launches XML Beans service. [xmlhack] [Contours]

This past weekend I had to waste quite a few hours because different XSLT implementations handled whitespace hence position() differently. Not only that they seem to have different default for disable-output-escaping='yes|no'. XSLT is still better than SAX and DOM (as I mentioned once in "List of RSS feeds") but sometimes its grotty yuckiness becomes too much.

BEA's new offering XML Beans and its Javascript based XML-aware scripting language seem to offer a way out of current mess. More and more high level technologies will find acceptance as people get tired of dealing with bit-fiddling like trying to determine <foo></foo> is equivalent to <foo/> under what contexts and what stage of the processing pipeline you may be at. Throw in entities, namespaces, process instructions, etc and we have a roomful of drunken monkeys going hyperactive. Even a simple matter like encoding can be dicey  because many XML/XSLT implementations are limited a few "well known" encodings like UTF-8, ISO 8859-1, ASCII but not Big5.  One implementation forces output to be UTF-16, which nobody uses. And of course all of these are simple peanuts before Schema, PSVI, binary XML and so on.

See also: http://notes.antville.org/20020701/ for lots of XML related notes and http://radio.weblogs.com/0107481/2002/10/24.html#a831 and other items in my scrapbook.