Re: It's time for practical XML!

Simon St.Laurent (simonstl@simonstl.com)
Sun, 04 Oct 1998 11:48:14 -0400


At 11:40 PM 10/3/98 -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:
>James Robertson wrote:
>>
>> * rock-solid XML parsers for every platform
>> under the sun, especially business development
>> tools like: Visual Basic, Delphi, Powerbuilder,
>> etc.
>
>It would be foolhardy for anyone to make a commercial parser when
>Microsoft already has promised that one will ship as a COM object with
>every version of Windows and Internet Explorer.

While it might not make sense to create the COM object, it might make a lot
of sense to build supporting structures for VB, Delphi, PowerBuilder, and
whatever other tool you like to work with. And it _might_ conceivably be
worthwhile to build parsers for these environments. There are hurdles -
Unicode one of the largest among them - but it might well make sense to
build DOM-compliant or SAX-compliant (okay, fine, it probably won't be
precisely SAX) for these environments.

(Heck, I know a fair number of people using Delphi precisely because it
_isn't_ an MS product, and they might like a non-MS parser for political
reasons.)

My personal focus these days is definitely on Java, but there are plenty of
days I wish I had the Delphi environment's full set of tools. (Yes, I have
JBuilder, but it's not quite the same...)

Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth (November)
Building XML Applications (December)
http://www.simonstl.com