tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post114055493085250133..comments2023-06-17T06:46:48.762-07:00Comments on The Odds Are One: Maybe Ours is The Language of The FutureTransient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-1140609656758484072006-02-22T04:00:00.000-08:002006-02-22T04:00:00.000-08:00OK, so I've read this post a couple of times, and ...OK, so I've read this post a couple of times, and each time I feel two things at the same time: 1) that it's saying something really important that I want/can speak to, and 2) that I just don't quite get it. <BR/><BR/>I'm not sure what I don't get, but maybe it is, like Dan, XML. I think I fully understand html, because it's a language that's linked to a protocol. When I type http:// into my browser window, then I'm telling that app to use the http protocol to go look for documents written in the html language. <BR/><BR/>But xml seems to be everywhere, and that doens't make sense to me. As Dan says, RSS feeds are xml. But OpenOffice documents are in xml, and Apple's new word processor pages has xml at its core. <BR/><BR/>So is xml like a grammer or something? Each app makes up its own language rules, but they follow some rules that are 'xml'. <BR/><BR/>Where are we now?fronesishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13544185676179565507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-1140587478239003682006-02-21T21:51:00.000-08:002006-02-21T21:51:00.000-08:00I'm not one of your more mathmatically-inclined/pr...I'm not one of your more mathmatically-inclined/programmer commenters, so pardon the simplicity of my comment, but this was actually helpful because I've never gotten my head around what exactly XML is. Everything I read details how it started, I guess from the same ancestors as HTML, but that you can create your own tags and thus structure a document for a very specific purpose. But I never understood how anyone or anything can render your made-up tags. Isn't RSS XML? Why does that work?<BR/><BR/>I guess I still don't get it, but you speak to that a bit when you say "there are parsers in most programming languages that can read in a WSDL document and produce code libraries to use so that you can call the web service." In an XML document then, does one create a language and then as long as everyone who talks in relation to that document plays by the same made-up rules of that language, things can happen? I don't mean XML structure rules, I mean parsing the "language" of the tags themselves. Like <balloon><panty><chocolate type="cindy" /></panty></balloon>. Yay, my first XML document! <BR/><BR/>Fine, I'm not a programmer. I'm going to go write a poem or something.Danhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04448647157972462097noreply@blogger.com