[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> On my way back from XML 2001, I started thinking about the conference
> I'd just seen and how exactly I landed in XML. Wandering through a
> bunch of different loosely-connected ideas, I started thinking that XML
> and markup in general - including and perhaps especially SGML - simply
> doesn't fit well with a huge amount of what the rest of computing wants
> to believe.
I have been following similar tracks for a while and, as Tim says, I
wonder if it's not a new indication that we have not (yet?) been able to
reconciliate data and programs.
I have seen this happen with RDBMS when I was working at Sybase. The
cases which were hitting the second level support where I was working
were the most pathological ones, but they were clearly showing the
mismatch between OO programing and RDBMS with people "cleanly"
programing objects embedding their SQL requests ending up doing all
their joins client side with the consequences you can imagine on
performances.
Other applications were victims of design tools hiding the database
without doing any physical design optimization and a last category
discovered that the schema resulting of a OO design was almost
impossible to understand by a mere human and not useable for ad-hoc queries.
I think we are rediscovering these 3 problems (lack of maturity of
design tools, fundamental mismatch between data and program and the fact
that "hidden" data structures often need to be "unhidden" and exposed to
final users with XML).
At the end of the day, I think that this "crisis" might be more profund
than "post OO" and be a paradigm shift from treatments to data. It's no
surprise that XML is the technology of choice for archivists: XML is
(more than SGML which DTD can be considered as "programming
instructions") the promise of information which can survive the
technologies used to write it (or to define its schema).
The problem is that this promise is not interesting for all the
applications of XML and that XML is also used as something hidden in
applications which just don't care about the posterity of their XML
documents!
Eric
--
Rendez-vous a Paris pour les Electronic Business Days 2002.
http://www.edifrance.org/ebd/index.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist http://xmlfr.org http://dyomedea.com
http://xsltunit.org http://4xt.org http://examplotron.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
