[Zope3-dev] ZCML alternative

[Jeffrey P Shell]

On 6/4/02 4:24 PM, "Jim Fulton" <jim@zope.com> wrote:

> Jeremy Hylton wrote:
>> 
>>>>>>> "CW" == Chris Withers <chrisw@nipltd.com> writes:
>> 
>>   CW> Personal preference I guess. That said, I've seen a lot more XML
>>   CW> and XML-like languages where the bulk of the content is in the
>>   CW> contents rather than the attributes of the tag.
>> 
>> This conclusion is where we left the issue last time it was
>> discussed.  Some people prefer content in the attributes, and they're
>> entitled to their wrong opinion <wink>.
>> 
>> I'd be happy to see a configuration language that made less use of
>> attributes, but I thought we had a Papal edict on the subject.

I thought the Papal edict was that ZCML stayed (in lieu of the Python based
solutions), but not that ZCML was now feature frozen.  It's an important
part of the story that could probably still be debated.

> We did. :)

Still can't stop my whining!

But at least you no longer have to hear me yell every time I have to update
one of these things.  :).

The world is filling up with bad XML, and we're just adding to it, and
losing any real benefits of having the XML format anyways.  Personally, I
think it's a bad design decision, and I know I should have gotten involved
on the issue earlier.  I'm regretting now that I didn't.

Maintenance of ZCML, I reckon, is where this is going to come back and bite
us.  The example Shane showed looked like something MUCH easier to revisit
in the future.  What we're now stuck with is like old Perl.

Those are my last words.

Except for this one: yuck.

And these ones - I've been editing XML like this over the past couple of
weeks, and I've done lots of accidental stupid things.  So, as a potential
user, not just someone we're all theorizing about, I'm already having
problems.  I never had a problem with the Java Servlet configuration.  I'm
really not looking forward to having to maintain ZCML, as either a developer
or administrator.  I'm glad for what it's attempting to do, but I don't
think it's doing it as right as it could be.

-- 
Jeffrey P Shell 
www.cuemedia.com