I already went through this topic in the Borland Forums, but I thought I would
replicate my feelings again on this topic.
The very first good reason to avoid it is that it's not native.
While this may not seem a compelling reason at a first sight, just think it means
that you'll have to either ship MSXML with your program, or let the users download it,
neither of which seems appealing to me, as long as you have several native ones which
will compile straight into your exe.
Another good reason is compatibility. What is it going to happen if Microsoft messes it up
changing the interfaces? Wouldn't be the first time, wouldn't supposedly be the last one.
There's also another extremely valuable reason: what happens if some day an exploit gets
found which will allow an attacker to make something to your PC?
MS reputation in regard to exploits isn't brilliant to say the least and this is a true
concern for me.
If you thought I was finished... well you were wrong :-)
MSXML behaves disaccording to the standard sometimes, allowing malformed XML
files to load correctly. Yes, I'm not joking. This happens mainly with charachters out of
standard( there're quite a few of them which aren't defined ) and that MSXML will
accept silently.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, have a look at this.
Another issue: cross platform development. If you use MSXML alone you may
have a really hard time making a Linux version out of it. The issue can be
greatly mitigated the exact moment you start using TXMLDocument component tho.
Nope, I'm not finished yet, there's some more things to say :-)
With the advent of dotNET , COM will get discarded, and using a COM based parser
doesn't look the best choice as to now.
Ok, now I have finished :-)
Cheers
No comments:
Post a Comment