RE: [xml-dev] json v. xml

["Michael Champion" <mc@xegesis.org>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:rjelliffe@allette.com.au]
> Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2007 9:49 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] json v. xml
> 
> Well, that would be SGML 2.0 wouldn't it?  SGML was founded on the
> notion that
> people had legitimate needs for different syntaxes, 

Interesting thought, and thanks for the explanation that this all could be
based on grammar rather than data model uniformity. Still, I'm not sure it's
a comforting thought to know that this could all be done the SGML way, given
that SGML was not exactly a resounding success outside a very small
community. 

> Why think in terms of chaos?  There is no chaos that some people use GIF
> and some people use JPEG. A rich solution space is good. The chaos comes
> from when the individual technologies are so bloated and indivisible
> that people cannot compose their own solutions using optimal
> subtechnologies.

I was thinking of the O(N**2) problem for those who have to work with
different components that support some subset of the rich solution space.
JPEG, GIF, and PNG images are integrated behind the eyeballs, so there is no
need to worry about the N*N-1 mappings, everybody just has to display the N
formats. If N more general data metaformats become widespread, lots of
people will have to worry about how to map between a data source that
produces one and various applications that consume others, and vice-versa in
read/write scenarios. That "chaos" could be a healthy driver of evolutionary
simplification as compared with XML's current bloated stasis, but it won't
be much fun for the poor folks who have to decide which of several
"standards" they need to learn and support. Some sort of underlying
unification principle, whether it be grammar-based or datamodel-based, would
seem useful to make their lives easier.   

But it does look like we as an industry are going to be running this
experiment, and we will soon know if it yields "chaos" or a "rich solution
space."