[geeks] Sneaking around keyword itis

[Jonathan C Patschke]

On Monday, Nov 25, 2002, at 22:39 US/Central, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   Well I've been wondering the myself, off and on, but I just came 
> across an excellent example.  The QYXie system can deal with tests & 
> quizzes...and we'll need to import them (questions, answers, answer 
> choices, and hints) from other educational content providers.  With 
> XML, we just send them a DTD and say "give them to us like this"...and 
> with about a dozen lines of code, bang...it's there.

-Exactly-.  This is what I mean by "irregularly structured data".  That 
is, data that -has- a structure, but it isn't consistent enough that 
you could represent it easily with, say a "Rolodex" style database of 
fixed 1-to-1 or 1-to-N (not 1-to-many) fields.  Again, though, this is 
-data-, not code.  I've seen lots of great examples of XML used for 
data, and quite a few where it's used for data that could be just as 
easily (and richly) represented via a flat tabular file.

>   Sure, there are other ways to do this, and this is nothing 
> new...hell, I've done exactly this dozens upon dozens of times in the 
> past...but *never* has it been this easy and this 
> platform-independant.  Never.  I am really impressed.

I guess I just haven't been bitten by the bug yet, or personally had to 
do a data transformation over anything that complicated.

>   Yes...This "water" language is a completely different story.  
> Complete and utter bullshit, in my opinion.  Not that anyone asked, 
> but hell, it's me so I'm gonna say so anyway! ;)

It is to XML what the applet craze was to Java.

--
Jonathan C. Patschke
Celestrion Information Systems
Thorndale, TX