The Examples Speak For Themselves

In the previous two blogs, I've talked about the problems of XML and how Candle Markup addresses these problems. In this blog, I'll show you how Candle Markup can effectively express different kinds of structured data. "A good example is the best sermon." So I'll let the examples speak for themselves.

A Markup Notation Better Then Ever

In the previous blog article, I talked about general data-exchange format and some of the problems of XML. The original design that constrained XML to just a general syntactic format caused great headache to people building advanced processing capabilities on top of XML.

Among the people who are rethinking XML, James Clark has suggested 3 approaches: XML 2.0, XML.next, MicroXML, which pus forward a solid framework to start with. Candle is definitely along the XML.next line. Candle is not compatible with XML; it actually goes beyond XML to unify markup data model with object data model.

In this blog, I'll explain in more details on how Candle Markup (especially with the new object notation) addresses many problems of XML, and how it compares with other formats like JSON and YAML.

Who needs XML?

With the latest beta release, Candle introduces several new features to its markup format, including a new object notation and a new clean namespace syntax. With this release, I believe Candle Markup to be one of the best general data-exchange format.

Before I talk specifically about Candle's Markup format, let's look at the existing general data-exchange formats. The most well known formats are XML and JSON. We've seen many hot debates on which one is better. I'm not going to restart the holy war here. I'll try to get you out of the tit-for-tat comparison of JSON against XML, and let your look the problem from a more fundamental perspective. You can ask yourself a few questions: why do we need a general data-exchange format? what purposes should it server? what characteristics should it have? Once you've got your answers, you can read on to see if yours reconcile with mine.