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- From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>
- To: xml-dev@xml.org
- Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 11:10:37 -0500
There is no tougher audience to have to sell or teach
XML to than "to the metal" programmers. Why?
Well, as they look into it, they see the same tricks
they have been using for years in one bag without
all of the optimizations. Again, this audience
shares a singular philosophy, "Make it run, then
make it run faster." Performance has been the
one requirement it is hard to argue with. These
guys know how to build Ferraris and Cadillacs
and nobody does it better than they do.
Our CEO (a darn good engineer) sat in my
office and looked back at me two years ago and said,
"Len, that's all very good but that will be slow and my customers
will be unhappy and go elsewhere." And so
it goes. Yet sometimes, fast enough, less complex,
and cheaper win over "Cadillac systems". Software
like hardware is becoming a commodity market
and that change is making people consider different
tradeoffs. Playing well with others is one of those
tradeoffs. Performance can lose to utility.
Sometimes you need a racecar; sometimes you need a bus.
The tradeoffs to making a lingua franca for
WAN systems have been a long time in the making.
There is very little in XML that is unfamiliar to
the HyTime and TEI or DSSSL veterans. Fast cheap
processors and memory stood between these designs
and implementation for years. That's past. What
is never past, by definition, is the zeitgeist.
Until a technology can be embraced by some critical mass,
it sits on the shelf or in the lab, a darling of the faster is
better, elegance is key, crowd of well-educated,
well-trained, but ultimately wallflower implementations
whose time has not yet come.
Today, XML is the best of the worst, the ugly duckling
just now endowed, Cinderella still smudged
with cinders but fitting snugly into a beautiful
gown and beloved of the young Prince. The fairy tale
and the fairy godmother (The Zeitgeist) favor
XML today. That may change but it won't change
in favor of more abstract, harder to understand,
harder to sell systems. Jean Paoli was right: if
it isn't easy, it just won't sell.
Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
clbullar@ingr.com
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
-----Original Message-----
From: Rick JELLIFFE [mailto:ricko@geotempo.com]
It is interesting to speculate that the more that XML is hijacked by the
"XML is serialization" crowd, away from its roots as a humanistic (i.e.,
typist-oriented) text-based user interface, the less justification there
is for using XML rather than ASN.1
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