Wise words

TorgoX on 2003-04-08T23:40:30

Dear Log,

An important question:

<pdcawley> Put it this way, how overengineered do you think something has to be before the XML folks start to notice?

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XML as a second system

clintp on 2003-04-09T02:16:48

I've always thought of tagging systems for data storage and interchange as wheels being re-invented left-and-right for every industry and purpose imaginable. SGML, EDI, CSV, etc.. Think back 10 years, 20 years, at what was being touted as the best way to exchange data with other companies. Of course the Y axis of basic ascii-ness of early computing systems was extended in various ways too for foreign alphabets as well (code pages, unicode, etc..).

XML strikes me as the combined second-system effect of all of the above. Thus it suffers from the duality of "let it be simple" and "it has to do everything." It only feigns at the first for the PR, and grows new tentacles monthly to accomplish the second.

Re:XML as a second system

ziggy on 2003-04-16T03:09:55

XML strikes me as the combined second-system effect of all of the above.

Then I would say that Piers' question isn't so much important as much as it's the wrong question to ask.

XML is a perfectly acceptable solution for one very important problem: interoperability with data exchange. There's a benefit to not creating a new binary format for each and every fragment of information we want to author, exchange, archive or share. (There's even less of a benefit to shoving all of that data into XML and calling it "published".) At the heart, XML is nothing more than a serial text stream with angle brackets. Yet that text stream scales up to handle complex tree structures; with that property, it can be used for virtually every kind of information you need to exchange.

The more important question to be asking is, is this the right problem to solve?, or rather is this the right level to solve this problem?. That is, do we want one universal format that is (notoriously) difficult to author, difficult to extend (witness WXS, SOAP, XLink), and makes data exchange more difficult?

What I think Piers is trying to point out is that XML-centric solutions get way abstract before they ever gain a hope of becoming approachable. And with a universalist mindset, every addition to the XML stack makes the whole thing more daunting, even though each specific addition is only meant to address a specific problem, not a universal one.

XML ain't great, but...

Dom2 on 2003-04-09T06:35:15

I'd really s/XML/Java/g. Never seen such bloat in all my life. Their out-of-the-box standards seem to be about the size of CPAN whilst being a lot less comprehensible at the same time.

-Dom

Re:XML ain't great, but...

darobin on 2003-04-09T09:25:47

Seconded. XML is an easy but lousy shot because while the horrible stuff is the part that gets the most PR (presumably because it needs it), there are lots of easy and elegant stuff being very useful under the radar.

Java on the other hand is exactly that. Take a complex Perl module implementing a horribly kludgy spec such as SOAP::Lite, and compare it in size, bloat, and ease-of-use with the supposedly state of the art Axis by the ASF.

And don't even get me started on what most Java programmers think of chaining SAX filters...