• Steve O. (unregistered)

    Wow, nice use of a self describing language...

  • Avner Kashtan (unregistered)

    I can see it now. The guy just got the job and was told to write up an XML data structure. When he asked what XML is, he was told "Like HTML - you write tags whose names describe them". So here we go. <tag>'s with names describing them. Perfect sense.

  • JD (unregistered)

    And you thought RealAudio was bad.

  • skicow (unregistered)

    It's version 2 of Real XML too! I must have missed version 1.

  • Mike R. (unregistered)

    Judging by the current version, you didn't miss much.

  • FCC (unregistered)

    AdjstdMnthlyRent, AdjstmntNgtv_CHK?

    Nice variable names.

  • SBMTR (unregistered)

    EVRYTHG IN SYSTM IS ACRNYM. OBNXS, BT YU GT USD TO T.

  • Rick (unregistered)

    This looks like a templating language to be processed in XSLT (templating language done for templating language!). I did program one once. I had gotten tired of checking for every tag, so I used the "tag" tag. Of course, only for the template declarations. In the end I abandoned the whole project because it was much easier and fast er to use <?php templates?>.

  • Rick (unregistered)

    This couldn't be implemented in XML, due to $ characters in the tag "names".

    According to the XML1.0 DTD (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-Name) there can't be dollar signs in tag names. And here we got something called "CM1_CndtnAdjstmnt_$TWC". The $ sign clearly makes it non implementable in XML 1.0. UNLESS we effectively replace the tag names for attributes.

    So in other words, this structure is nothing but an associative array converted to an XML format, for possibly storing session values.

    That's not the WTF. The WTF is the STUPID names like "realXML" :P Oh man. Anyway, at least it works.

  • Razzie (unregistered)

    AdjstdMnthlyRent

    That guy rocks! Look at the memory he saves when loading this xml in memory! He saves 3 characters!

    Seriously, if you DO plan to use very describing names, why bother to cut off 3 characters? That always looks so silly...

  • Peter (unregistered)

    OMFG! this looks like something xmlified from a past employer, like 4 years ago. "_$TWC" is the suffix meaning "currency, use commas to separate thousands." "_CHK" is the suffix for "checkbox." All this stuff was for automating FannieMae and FreddieMac forms with html and using an ISAPI filter to squeegie out the data and fill it in (the ISAPI filter extracted the form data and populated the DB, and vice versa). It was to (theoretically) reduce the amount of FedEx letters sent across the US, since most of the forms were 1-4 pages long.

    You know that commercial where they show some folks sitting down to sign the paperwork for a mortgage, and its like 3 feet high? That is close to the size of paperwork when you buy a home or refinance it. And no, I did not work for the place in that ad.

    "order_status_num" has to do with the state machine the cases revolve around.

    A "case" is a pile of paperwork associated with a mortgage. The workflow was to have a finance company request (usually) a comparison of the real estate. Comparisons would be with similar units sold recently, or what the market value is. What condition is the place in? Are the rental units occupied or not. All that kinda stuffs.

    "Real" in this case has to do with the name of their other products, which all start with "real." And deal with real estate.

    Want more details or should I stfu and go have a beer? Ah, its friday, therefore its beer time!

  • foxyshadis (unregistered)

    Dammit, peter! You ruined the fun! Still, the XSLT/script to work with this must be nasty, if it's a storage format and not transport.

    However, that means that this wasn't just some fly-by-night coder, the stupid vowelless field-name abbreviations were actually put into a spec by some large financial institution(s), possibly the Big Two themselves.

    Ask anyone who programmed a PDP-11, they'll assure that saving 100 bytes in memory is absolutely essential! Just don't tell them about the half-billion you're using on the side.

  • Separated at birth.. (unregistered)

    Does anyone remember the XML that I got posted as a story a couple of months ago? The guy that is responsible for this MUST be the brother of the guy that was responsible for mine. Eerie..

  • tim (unregistered)

    Umm, Separated at birth was supposed to be the title..

  • Lorenzo Gatti (unregistered)

    I've used a somewhat unimaginative XML format in which the root element was <root>.

  • Centaur (unregistered)

    In the land of Mordor, where even the shadows lie…

    The guy obviously needed some prefix to prepend to “XML” because XML element names are not allowed to start with any combination of /[Xx][Mm][Ll]/ (2.3/6), and he didn’t have a sensible name for the root element.

  • Peter (unregistered)

    Sorry foxyshadis, but the ISAPI dll that they were using when this was poor old html (good job submitting 400kb html forms on dial up) parsed all the pages that were served or posted to the site and extracted/inserted the data. I do not believe that there are any xslt stylesheets.

  • Anoymous Coward (unregistered)

    Almost makes you wonder if "tag" means "hey, here's a db entry" where "name" is the column name...which would explain the insane names...

  • Aredridel (unregistered)

    Looks like filemaker!

  • peter beaguely (unregistered)

    xml is the shiznit! this guy is on to it. props!

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