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On Thu, 2002-11-14 at 09:21, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> Well XML for data is also kind of ridiculous, you end up repeating the
> same tags and local structures over and over again. But that didn't prevented
> it from being extremely successful in that area. For some carrying overweight
> as extra redundant context seems to be considered a good thing, for others
> it's an heresy, go figure ....
>
I believe that's the second time this morning that's been said. I think
Walter Perry's Left Hand of Darkness post was actually making about the
same point. And I'll add a Desperate Hacker's take to the Middle and
High brow versions above.
The .NET example that Pam linked to this morning. (Nothing personal to
either Pam or Microsoft, it's just it came through today.) The
underlying postulate of the example is that some company is keeping five
years of sales data in a structured text file. The structure is XML, but
so what.
.NET then makes it really easy to find the right records in that
structured text file and reformat them as HTML for display. But,
transaction data in text file? Does it go in from punch cards? Now I'm
sure that there's a piece of magic middleware involved that takes a
properly normalized and ACIDified RDBMS and makes it look like that
structured text file, but is there really a reason to do all that
instead of just querying the database and exporting the result table as
HTML?
Too many smart experienced people are getting frustrated by what really
sound like different aspects of the same thing. That probably means
something very fundamental is broken.
Frank
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