RE: [xml-dev] XML for Video, Pizza Shops & TakeOut

["Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Lyon [mailto:david@globaltradedesk.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 11:10 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: [xml-dev] XML for Video, Pizza Shops & TakeOut
> 
> 

> Flame me, Flame me, xml is getting very dull

XML always was very dull.  SGML is mind numbing.
It's more fun to write code to solve problems that
had been solved thousands of times before, adding 
new tweaks every time to make it necessary to write even
more code whenever the systems have to interoperate.
But for some reason, the greedy fools who run businesses
don't WANT to pay us geeks to do this, so they make us
use simple, standardized grammars, parsers, APIs, transformation
engines, constraint satisfaction validators, etc. when megabytes
of custom code would work slightly better sometimes.

Worse yet, this stuff *is* infesting the infrastructures
of pizza chains and other such companies.  It's just so utterly
bor-ING that nobody talks about it.  Re-writing an order
entry application for every mobile device would be more 
interesting: we could learn arcane details of soon-to-be-obsolete
environments and entertain each other with parties about the fascinating
differences between the screen display routines of Nokia and Motorla
phones, or Pocket PC and Palm PDAs.  But no, the damned XML people
want to put the same old XHTML or WML rot everywhere.  

The real pisser is this SOAP stuff.  REAL nerds could get different
CORBA impelementations to interoperate after only a month or two, and
maybe patch together some COM interoperability in a year ... and keep
it all running for days at a time (as long as the stupid sysadmins didn't
mess with those firewall things).  But now they want to just leverage
HTTP to do all this and send XML messages around!  How totally inefficient!
Why, I bet this must bring the average load on my server CPUs up to 5% or
so,
and make me waste my precious internet bandwidth on stupid business
messages. My MP3 and JPEG downloads are measurably slower now.

Anyway, I hear ya!