Tuesday, August 24, 2004

IML

I've always thought that xml is a sort of unatural way to describe hirarchical data, at least when it should be human readable. I've obviously also always thought that python's use of indent is a great case of connecting the good with the useful. Of I hacked, and out came "Indent Markup Languag". It may be a bit unripe ( only the second iteration so far ) but this will show once I put it to some real-world use. To illustrate the concept, some IML and how it converts to XML.

the iml: 

html

 head

   title "mypage"

   body

     a color="black" href="http://www.google.com" "google"

     table

       tr

         td "test"

         td

           "another"

       tr

         td bgcolor="red" "second"

         td

           "and a nice

           multiline

           test"

that evaluates to: 

<html>

 <head>

   <title>

     mypage

   </title>

   <body>

     <a color="black" href="http://www.google.com">

       google

     </a>

     <table>

       <tr>

         <td>

           test

         </td>

         <td>

           another

         </td>

       </tr>

       <tr>

         <td bgcolor="red">

           second

         </td>

         <td>

           and a nice

           multiline

           test

         </td>

       </tr>

     </table>

   </body>

 </head>

</html>


I think that's pretty nice :)
If you want, play around with the parser
Posted by at

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might be interested in looking at YAML (http://www.yaml.org/). Check out the "Get Started" link on there for an example.

Ben Sizer (came here via Ian Bicking's weblog)

8:13 AM
Florian said...

I checked out yaml before I did this, three particular things disturbing about yaml.

-Yaml is not a markup language. Long story simple truth, markups can be converted against each other, not markups are either not safe or not sanely translated into markup.
-Yaml introduces some line-noise I did not want
-I do not want to set on a fixed indent-width ( as you may have noticed, the first line of a block in iml sets the correct indent for the rest of the blocks, quite like python.

In short thus, yaml or xml are not pythonic, iml is.

9:54 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)