xml-dev - Re: Dissillusioned about interoperability.

[Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>]

Kent Sievers wrote:
> 
> I am working on a project that is heavily involved with trying 
> to make sense out of data from multiple outside sources.  Years 
> ago when we started out we had our own proprietary way of 
> representing "documents", and had to convert the different 
> formats into ours in order to consume them.  

Without getting into philosophy and magic let me point out that you've
won two things:

 * you know longer have to write parsers for these "properietary
languages"

 * there are dozens of tools for doing standardized transformations
between these sorts of languages -- including XSLT

So XML is a nice simple specification that makes your life a little bit
easier. It doesn't magically solve the entire "interoperability
problem." It solves one little layer. Things like RDF, HyTime, XLink and
so forth solve other (also fairly thin) layers. I'm sorry it is so often
sold as doing more.

 Paul Prescod

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