Re: almost four years ago....

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 9:06 AM -0400 6/15/01, hector santos wrote:

>Soon someone will develop a XML p-code compiler or design
>XRISC (XML Reduced Instruction Set) simply because someone
>will get the incredible bright idea that:
>
>          <ORDER>
>             <PRODUCTID>...</PRODUCTID>
>             <QUANTITY>...</QUANTITY>
>             <CUSTOMERINFO>...</CUSTOMERINFO>
>          </ORDER>
>
>augmented with all the definition overhead, etc., can be transformed
>and delivered in some reduced format! <g>
>

Actually this has been invented many times already. It seems to be 
invented roughly once every two months. It's proven completely 
pointless in practice. There is no actual benefit to it, and no one 
needs it. Worse yet, it substantially eliminates many of the existing 
benefits of XML. There seems to be a large group of programmers who 
mistakenly believe:

1. File size matters.
2. They can compress better than gzip.
3. Human legible/human editable data doesn't matter.

All three beliefs have been empirically proven false time and time again.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|                  The XML Bible (IDG Books, 1999)                   |
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