Hi Juergen,

thank you for your info about xmlgawk and sorry for late reply.

Concerning XML in general my imagination is this:

1) XML is much more than just another web technology.
   It is a data carrier !

2) As it really separates data from formats it is very helpfull for
data exchange. In my opinion it has the potential to make a lot of
specific conveters obsolete.
Example: 
We store a lot of data in just one XML which is about 5M.
Than we compile different 'VIEWS' out of this big data set.
It takes some seconds usually, but this is totally OK as we do not
need realetime web services for thousands of users simultaniously.
If you create an Ecell sheet and store it as xml you will see how you
can easily create such a file with an xslt. Means we select certain
information out of the big xml and prersent it in Ecell.
Onother one may need a top level spice representation of some data. So
we can again select the required information and present this a text
(formated as spice).

3) I'm quite fed up with smal text files which store different values
(parameters , configurations , etc. ) in nearly each format you can
think of.
Doing this small files in XML makes a big progress as you now deal
with a standarized structure.
On top of that you can have a schema file which excactly specifies
what exact structure and data range is allowed. Means if you create a
new config you have a formal check BEFORE you get to the application!
Just now some colleage told me that first EDA tool vendors use XML for
such config files.

Hope that helps to understand our interest in xml

Rolf



Jürgen Kahrs <Juergen.KahrsDELETETHIS@v...> wrote in message news:<2s823jF1hnboqU1@u...>...
> Rolf Kemper wrote:
> 
> > However, can you drop me some lines on xmlgawk ?
> 
> xmlgawk currently has the status of an experimental
> extension of GNU Awk. You can find more information
> about it in my posting in the newsgroup comp.lang.awk:
> 
>   http://groups.google.de/groups?hl=de&lr=&ie=UTF-8&frame=right&th=c016911846a52fdd&seekm=2o4bv6F6u6h2U1%40uni-berlin.de#link1
> 
> I have just started writing some GNU-like doc about it
> but the doc is not ready yet. Until then, Stefan Tramm's
> description may be helpful:
> 
>   http://homepage.mac.com/stefan.tramm/iWiki/XmlGawkMacOSX.html
> 
> > Can I use this within MSXML4 processor ?
> 
> I don't know too much about XML tools in the Microsoft Universe.
> 
> > How about schema check ?
> 
> xmlgawk is not meant to validate XML files.
> xmlgawk does not use a DOM representation (although
> Manuel Collado has written one in xmlgawk). Are you
> sure you need a DOM-representation to do your work ?
> My experience is that users often over-estimate the
> need for a DOM. But I am ready to be convinced.
> 
> > As you stated, YES , the example is like counting some beans, but just
> > for the sake of demonstration. It addresses a very tiny problem of an
> > 5M mixed data set. So my real world is a farm of beans , fruits ,
> > nuts, vegitables and many other things.
> 
> XML files with several MB of data, sounds interesting.
> How long does it take your XSL processor to do a run
> over these files ? Several seconds or more ? I am asking
> because I am interested in finding out typical uses of
> XML files (outside web design), including turnaround times.
> 
> > Myself is just creating different dishes out of it. XLST in
> > combination with XPATH is a great help, as I have to present the same
> > dish in differrent restaurants (HTML , Text , Exel , Spice ) too.
> 
> Spice ! Is this data-flow typical for industrial environments ?
> If so, I would take this as an indication that XML has definitely
> broken out of the web design niche.
> 
> Thanks for posting such an interesting use-case.