Non-Structured XML

Why would you want to use XML this way?

<Thing>
	<stuff name="product_id">0926INGBS10075810</stuff>
	<stuff name="company">Curabitur Fringilla Corp.</stuff>
	<stuff name="title">Nullam Enim Justo (PC/Mac)</stuff>
	<stuff name="Price">24.99</stuff>
	<stuff name="Availability">See Site</stuff>
	<stuff name="upc">0600100098554</stuff>
	<stuff name="description">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas euismod ipsum et est. Nunc in magna. In sit amet justo. Aenean tempor, est et facilisis dapibus, neque lacus lacinia metus, at hendrerit est purus id neque. Proin lacinia sollicitudin ligula. Aliquam dui eros, scelerisque ut, interdum vel, venenatis in, nisl.</stuff>
	<stuff name="boxshot">http://www.blah.com/product.gif</stuff>
	<stuff name="purchase_url">http://www.blah.com/buy.asp?sku_id=0926INGBS10075810</stuff>
	<stuff name="platform">xbox</stuff>
</Thing>

This makes no sense to me. Not only does this run against the spirit of XML but it’s inefficient to process. I’m dealing with a file with tens of thousands of Thing elements. However, I only want to process elements where platform is equal to certain values. In order to determine is a Thing is for a certain platform I have to loop over each ‘stuff’ element and see if the ‘name’ attribute is equal to ‘platform’ and then check the value.

This schema also make the whole concept of validating against a DTD useless. They can remove and add as many ‘stuff’ element as they want without technically breaking the DTD but it could very well break the assumptions my import script relies upon.

This is the kind of issue XML is supposed to solve. Then people come along and completely sidestep the whole structured and validating concept with a design like this.

What’s worse is that this doesn’t come from some tiny company in the middle of nowhere who don’t have the resources to hire decent technical stuff. This comes from a company who deals with one of the largest retailers in the United States. In fact, the name of this company suggests that the exchange of product information is their entire business!

Would it be so hard to do this?

<Thing>
	<product_id>0926INGBS10075810</product_id>
	<company>Curabitur Fringilla Corp.</company>
	<title>Nullam Enim Justo (PC/Mac)</title>
	<price>24.99</price>
	<availability>See Site</availability>
	<upc>0600100098554</upc>
	<description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas euismod ipsum et est. Nunc in magna. In sit amet justo. Aenean tempor, est et facilisis dapibus, neque lacus lacinia metus, at hendrerit est purus id neque. Proin lacinia sollicitudin ligula. Aliquam dui eros, scelerisque ut, interdum vel, venenatis in, nisl.</description>
	<boxshot>http://www.blah.com/product.gif</boxshot>
	<purchase_url>http://www.blah.com/buy.asp?sku_id=0926INGBS10075810</purchase_url>
	<platform>xbox</platform>
</Thing>

 

Welcome

Welcome to Working Programmer. I’m a web developer who has been working on large scale consumer facing web sites for over a decade. The opinions expressed here come from that hard earned experience. While these are only my opinions and there’s always the real possibility of me being wrong about anything I say here I have learned over the years to trust my insticts. When I do that I’m usually successful. It’s only when I go against my instincts that I run into problems.

I’ve been wanting to write a bunch of articles about software development for a long time. My personal blog has developed nicely into a place for friends and family to keep up to date with my life. Those people couldn’t care less about software development. As such, it’s not a very good outlet for this particular topic.

So I decided to take the path of least resistance and sign up for an account with wordpress.com.

This site will be mix of heavyweight posts and lightweight posts. The heavyweight posts are where I weigh in on a variety of topics involved in the typical software development lifecycle. This is where I get to espouse my wisdom to anyone who will listen. In a nutshell, my version of Joel on Software. The lightweight posts will be stuff I happen to see on the web and think is worthy of a mention.

Who knows how this little experiment will turn out. At the very least I’ll be documenting what I consider to be a pretty solid set of software development practices.