[Openstreetmap] Re: [Openstreetmap-dev] OSM's Schema - moving it forwards.

Tom Carden tom at tom-carden.co.uk
Tue Nov 29 11:10:52 GMT 2005


On 11/29/05, Nick Whitelegg <Nick.Whitelegg at solent.ac.uk> wrote:
> I've always understood one of the key advantages of XML to be the fact that
> a human can read it, make sense
> of it and edit it in a text editor if need be.

Nah, the main advantage of XML is that everyone says "oh, OK", but if
you didn't use it they'd be saying "why aren't we using XML"?  There
are thousands of parsers and tools for reading and writing XML, you
shouldn't need to do it by hand/eye.  Sure, the fact that you *can*
eyeball it if you want is nice, but the main reason to use it is
because it's there...

> I write XML directly all the
> time (XHTML).
>

Writing valid XML by hand is really hard.  I wouldn't pretend I could do it...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.free-map.org.uk%2F

Just be thankful for liberal parsers in browsers (they aren't parsing
your XHTML as XML, I would put money on that).

Best,

Tom.




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