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On Fri, 2003-08-01 at 09:36, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> Patrick.Garvey@talaris.com writes:
> >Perverse is a very strong term to use.
>
> It was as polite a word as I could find.
>
> >markup is also cool for separating data and processes that act on that
> >data. yes, it's pretty heavyweight and there's all kinds of more
> >lightweight data interchange formats, but XML has got all this inertia
> >behind it and really great toolsets. Otright disparaging the use of
> >markup for purely machine communication can't be mainstream either. As
> >long as you can pay someone (or get paid for) debugging a bunch of
> ><UDWhatever_22> tags, then fine -- you get to use all the fancy APIs.
> >Why is this bad? Purely maintenance, IMHO.
>
> It's bad for a number of reasons.
>
> First, lousy markup design - for that's what I'll call it - sets bad
> precedents for people. If all I've encountered is <UDWhatever_22>, and
> that's what I think XML is, I'm liable to run like hell rather than deal
> with XML unless I'm paid an awful lot. (That's my general response to
> RDF/XML, and apparently it's not an unusual reaction.)
>
> Second, that kind of markup is only useful until we can't find the
> documentation any more. For cases where the documentation is always
> going to be absolutely positively necessary, maybe that's fine.
>
> Third, you're accepting all the costs of markup - text processing,
> verbose descriptions, etc. - and getting only a few of the benefits. If
> machine to machine communication is all you care about, there are much
> more efficient yet still interoperable ways to do it. Momentum's great,
> until the wave stops and you're left on a barren beach, far from the
> next potential improvement.
>
> Fourth, you're pretty much declaring that your markup is only to be
> handled by trained professionals. I guess that works fine with the cult
> of the programmer-priest, but it's not much good for the folks who
> actually like to get their hands dirty with the data but aren't
> necessarily programmers.
>
> That's a brief list; I'll be happy to come up with more if provoked.
>
> 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, and that perhaps they'll be able to come up
> with better answers more appropriate to the tasks and programming
> cultures where XML has landed.
xml isn't the silver bullet?
;)
rick
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