begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 11:25:06PM -0800: > Christian Seberino wrote: [snip] > >If so, I don't understand why the XML founders, with all their resumes, > >Ivy league degrees and dot.com millions didn't have enough collective IQ > >between them to invent a Unicodey Lispy dialect instead. > > Because they didn't start out to make XML a generalized exchange > language. XML stands for eXtensible *Markup* Language. It does a nice > job for markup.
I can't say that I've *ever* seen XML seriously used for markup. I've only ever seen it used for structured data storage/data exchange. > It does a crappy job for exchange. However, it has one primary > advantage that led to its being adopted: > > It is a *standard*. Anything can be a standard. Why would managers push one over the other? Because XML has been sold to them, and they've been promised some rather stupid features. "If our product talks XML, it can talk to any other program out there that talks XML, and we won't have to bother spending any time integrating different products." Riiiight. (Aside: M$ is fast-tracking something through ECMA now. As of today (or tomorrow) it'll get it certified as a _standard_. That's comforting.) > There are libraries to read XML. There are libraries to write XML. How > things are interpreted is standardized. No. How things are read in and written out is standardized. The interpretation is still left up to the programmer. XML means we get a generalized lexer and parser, but then, given a decent BNF, lex, and yacc, that part wasn't the hard part anyway. (I guess what bothers me is that most of what I see XML used for is either key-value pairs, or it's something that's gotten fiendishly complex to allow encoding non-hierarchial data; the result is a net loss for managing complexity.) > I can't tell you how many POS parsers I have written over the years to > read some vendor's POS proprietary format. Or how many stupid POS > proprietary formats I have had to reverse engineer. That's not much of a benefit, as now you're just trying to reverse engineer an abstract syntax tree... wait, you're a LISPer, that's second nature to you. Nevermind. :-P > XML makes both of those problems less of an issue. I don't have to > write an XML parser--I can suck the whole tree into memory using DOM for > most applications. I don't have to reverse engineer some obscure > packing, the XML can be examined with a text editor. This is true. But then, this is characteristic of a text format, and not really special to XML. Just wait until they start using some strange packing to drop proprietary image and raw-data formats into XML. We'll be right back to where we started.... > These two factors make XML worth shoving down the throats of > corporations. These two factors are, of course, the whole reason why > Microsoft is fighting the OpenOffice XML standard quite so vigorously. Forcing M$ to use a text format might be good, but I worry that the long-term effect will be to spread the obfuscating M$ idioms into 'accepted practice'. I'm not sure anything can be rammed down M$'s throad without the shover losing their arm. -- Colorful Metaphors On Demand. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
