Re: Whitespace

Sean Mc Grath (digitome@iol.ie)
Thu, 28 Aug 1997 16:21:22 +0100

>>Won't our desperate Perl hackers' beloved $_ variable be significantly less
>>useful if it contains the *entire* document.
>
>Just as it's not useful in processing HTML. Regexps that don't match across
>line boundaries are the most common problem I've seen in HTML-processing
>Perl scripts. Looks like that will continue until people figure out that
>Perl's line "Feature" is jsut a big when used with XML/HTML.
>

Bang goes the the notion of a lightweigth XML app. then! Thou shalt always
parse!

XML as a friendly format to, say, DPH needs some explaining. To use Perl to
read/write XML
you *must* use an XML parser. Indeed any tool intending to read/write XML
needs to use a
*fully blown parser* to get at the document. Bye bye the entire Unix family
of line oriented text processing apps:-(

>IT Sounds to me like what we really need is a small paper (about 5
>paragraphs) explaining whitespace for developers:
>
I think this is an excellent idea!