XML madness

Since the moment the term came into the world, people have gone crazy and beyond to use the word “XML” in every document and sentence they use. To me however it’s just another document format that comes in the craziest forms and sizes. To be honest, there doesn’t a moment go by where I look at some kind of xml file someone is using for their application and I just want to hit my head against a brick wall out of insanity. You won’t believe the amount of crap implementations you’ll come across.

But nevermind that, because it’s not part of the issue at the moment. The issue is, that I have written so far in my life written 2 parser algoritms for xml files: one in Delphi/Object-Pascal, and today in C++.

And you seriously wouldn’t ask me “Why?” if you had actually seen those horrible DOM interfaces where implementations come with a size ranging from 10-50MB.

The reason I wrote them is to “just” directly convert XML formatted strings or files, to the internal tree-node-leaf-whatever system I may be using at the time.

The point is, I write these things in about – let’s see – this one in C++ is about 170 lines of code. When I start writing it, and it happened both times, I don’t actually know what I’m doing… I just start writing, I know there’s some if structures, state booleans and position integers – but I’m not actually 100% aware of what I’m writing. It’s like typing on a keyboard like a monkey, deleting and retyping, deleting and retyping, and suddenly the code is there and it works.

I seriously don’t think any kind of fileformat should be able to put you through that state of not knowing. A fileformat should be *almost* as easy as writing the actual output functions, which everyone know in case of XML takes you about 60 seconds to write.

Anyway, enough ranting. Time to upload it to subversion.