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On Wednesday 19 December 2001 12:56 pm, Paul T wrote:
> > That wasn't it's design point. I think XML has been forced into
> > situations that it wasn't designed for, and for which it is less than
> > ideal.
>
> I agree with Michael's letter, which is
> "... Ahh, but that's true of most technologies that really take off...."
Right, but as I said, things don't usually stay there: they evolve beyond the
kludge, generally when the second or thrid generation solutions come along.
Also, I think market dynamics and international standards are somewhat at
odds here. Market dynamics are exposing gaps in functionality that need to be
filled for sure. The questions are whether you standardize on something poor
and/or destabalize things for the sake or market dynamics. Maybe I'm still
naive enough to believe that standards *can* be good technically and have
widespread benefits (and in fact, I think Unicode and XML generally *are*
good ;-)).
FWIW. I'm very happy to let SOAP/.Net/<whatever> happen. The problem is that
people rush into standardization during the prototype phase, when few of the
larger issues have become apparent, let alone been thought about. Let markets
run, and then standardize what results... but in the process, don't the
kludge on everyone else.
Adding control characters to XML for the sake of serialization is a knee-jerk
reaction at best.
FWIW. I agree with you too: a small subset of XML should be designed for use
in things like WebDAV etc. Call it something else and give it different
rules. Maybe the XML encoding of ASN.1 is it, maybe not (especially as ASN.1
is more about grammars).
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