OpenEuphoria

Re: Alternative for XML

• Posted by Derek Parnell <ddparnell at bigpond.com> Oct 16, 2003
• 492 views

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tommy Carlier" <tommy.carlier at pandora.be>
To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Subject: Alternative for XML


> 
> 
> I've created a markup language as an alternative for XML. I call it SMEL 
> (Some Modest Extensible Language). It behaves a bit like XML, but it's more 
> compact, and has some advanced features that XML doesn't have. To my 
> opinion, it's also more human-readable, especially for programmers.
> 
> I'm also making a Euphoria-library for reading and writing SMEL-documents.
> Is this a good idea? Would Euphoria-programmers use SMEL, or would they 
> prefer using XML?
> 
> Example: the XML-fragment:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0"?>
> <data>
> <element attribute="value" attribute2="value2">Some data</element>
> <empty/>
> </data>
> 
> translated into SMEL:
> 
> <smel version="1.0">
> data
> {
> element(attribute="value",attribute2="value2"){"Some data"}
> empty;
> }
> 

Interesting. I've been playing with something very similar for use with
win32lib. Your syntax is more inclusive than I need but it might be worth me
standardizing on SMEL.


Also, you might also like to consider non-text attribute values, and removing
the '=' symbol. For example ...

<smel version{1.0}>
data
{
element(attribute{value},attribute2{value2}){"Some data"}
empty;
}


For win32lib, I could do something like ...

<smel version{1.0}>
form{
  control{type{Window}, 
          caption{Hello, World!}, 
          left{12}, 
          top{10},
          width{300}, 
          height{300}, 
          flags{WS_VISIBLE, WS_DLGFRAME}
         },
  control{type{EditText},
          name{UserId},
          left{5}, top{5}
          width(units{char}){20}
         }
  control{type{Button},
          caption{Close},
          flags{autoclose},
          left(from{UserId}){2},
          bottom{5}
         }
  }


...hmmmm... I'll think about it some more.

-- 
Derek