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On Thu, 31 Jul 2003 19:36:58 -0400, Simon St.Laurent
<simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:
> One of my hopes for the W3C Binary Infosets meeting is that someone
> realizes that markup is a crappy solution for a lot of the projects
> people are using it for
For better or worse, that's not gonna happen. XML/markup is NOT a crappy
solution in the data world in those common situations where there is no
reliable documentation but there is basic consensus on semantics, where the
advantages of the network effect to drive down the cost of software and
expertise outweigh the extra processing cost, where vendor/platform
neutrality is critical and XML's experience can be leveraged, and --
especially -- where a lack of clear or stable format standards make ASN.1
and friends a bit too fragile. If anything, the trend is toward the "XML
is just an object serialization format" people to come back to the XML
fold, not for them to rue the day they got mixed up with XML. {Maybe they
rue the day they got mixed up with the W3C, or some specific XML
technology, or some aspect of the XML 1.0 spec, but that's another matter!)
.
There are some increasingly important corner cases where all this is needed
except that there is NOT that excess capacity that XML text/markup
processing requires. People are trying to figure how to have most of the
XML cake and eat it too: Keep Infosets, XPath, DOM, XSLT, XQuery,
validation, etc.; give up some interoperability, but get back some
performance. You may well be right that XML is ultimately destined to be
more trouble than it's worth in such scenarios, but it will take a lot of
failed experiments to prove that. Don't hold your breath.
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