The "Desperate Perl Hacker" can write an XML parser in a weekend

Michael Leventhal:

One of the goals of XML, as actually stated in the standard is the following:

It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.

Of course, this isn't exactly an objective statement. A few more objective criteria have been proposed as modifications of this statement, but no consensus has been reached. To some, "easy" means that a Perl hacker supplied with enough Jolt cola can write an XML application in a single sitting. To others, it means a computer science graduate student writing an XML parser over the weekend. Another point of view is that the complexity of XML is relatively unimportant in determining whether or not it is easy to write programs. Programs will simply use an XML API that hides the complexity of XML, and applications will be constructed with component architectures such as JavaBeans.