RE: "Uh, what do I need this for" (was RE: XML.COM: How I Learne d to Love daBomb)

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 21 Aug 2001 14:54:11 -0700, Michael Brennan wrote:
> There will always be some developers who will need to deal with these
> details, just as their are some developers who need to write code to deal
> with Unicode surrogate pairs. But those trying to solve business problems
> rarely have any use for this stuff, and telling them otherwise seems to me
> to be just promoting technology for technology's sake. XML is useful to them
> for data interchange, but at the API level it just gets in the way.

Funny that you say that last bit ("API level"), as much of what I find
interesting and exciting about XML is that it's an alternative to
thinking in terms of "APIs".

APIs are great if you're building programs.  They're damn near worthless
if you're trying to hold a conversation.  I'd argue that business,
despite attempts to the contrary, is much more like a conversation than
an API, and that XML offers far more flexible modeling of conversations.

I guess we'll be a few more (m|b)illion dollars before programmers get
past the idea that they must cast the world in their vision of
information, developed over decades of severely limited processing
power.

Simon St.Laurent