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If you ever find yourself in front of an audience trying
to explain the why of XML, particularly to programmers,
try this:
XML interoperability is often misunderstood because since XML
does not have operations, what is it doing to make a system
interoperable? The network effect? The network effect is a
power law, not a force for good or evil. Like XML, it does not care.
Think about it as two dimensions of interoperable scalability.
In the x, there is data. In the y, there are operations.
The x dimension scales almost infinitely if the names are well chosen.
The y dimension does not scale well as most operations are local.
However, when the x names are chosen well, that is, are
semantically potent, the x and y dimensions couple via the network
power law to drive the value of x and y simultaneously.
That coupling is why XML won.
len
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