I'll freely admit any day of the week that I like XML. It would be difficult to walk away from that, actually -- I stared using XML a little over 5 years ago (using working drafts and regexes -- ugh!). I've been to a handful of conferences, played with creating a markup language (a really bad POD derivative), taught a variety of XML topics. I've even converted some of my friends to start using it (it's about as important as getting a feel for patterns).
Nevertheless, there are those moments when I come across a gem buried somewhere in the steaming piles of cruft. I'm in the middle of an XML article for TPR right now (and I'm writing it in LaTeX -- how's that for irony!). The funny thing is that today may be the first time I tried to imagine the post-web world without XML.
It finally hit me today. A post-web non-xml world would be a lot like the world was in the late 80's/mid 90's. Back then we were still focusing on software. The impact XML has had is to completely and utterly change the conversation to talk about the data and data interchange rather than writing endless amounts of impedence-mismatch-compensators like file translation utilities, CORBA-to-COM bridges, binary file conversion tools, and so on. Lots of proprietary software, lots of feeping creatures, lots of bloat, lots of licensing fees, and very little whipitupitude.
So I like the post-web world with XML, mostly because the whipitupitude it brought with it has had a liberating and democratizing effect on software. Even with all of the really stupid things the XML world has done in the last four years, XML has made a net positive contribution. It's just that sometimes it takes some really deep poking around to see the good bits.
And that's the most frustrating part.
Come to think of it, how much cruft is there on CPAN and how much digging does it sometimes take to find the right module ?
Re:Isn't that always the case?
ziggy on 2002-02-17T21:42:40
Sort of. CPAN is the forest, and the gems are the individual trees. Simply taking the brute force search of choice through CPAN should find something good.If XML were the forest, then the gems would be the harmony of the ecosystem. Perhaps that's one reason why brute force assessments of XML don't fit or shed any light on the wisdom that went into it.
Re:post-web?
ziggy on 2002-02-18T17:13:26
post-web: software industry after the advent of the world wide web. See pre-web.pre-web: software industry before the advent of the world wide web. See post-web.
Re:post-web?
pudge on 2002-02-18T18:14:35
Oh, so you mean after the web has begun, not after the web has existed. OK.
