An easy-to-use technology is a double-edged sword (XML is an easy-to-us

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

In his book, DOM Scripting, Jeremy Keith notes that an easy-to-use
technology is a double-edged sword:

    A technology that people can speedily and easily 
    use will probably be adopted very quickly.  
    However, there is likely to be a correspondingly 
    low level of quality control.

    For example, HTML's ease of use is one of the 
    reasons behind the explosive growth of the Web.  
    Anyone can learn the basics of HTML in a short 
    space of time and create a web page very quickly.  
    It's even possible to use WYSIWYG editors to make 
    web pages without ever seeing a line of markup.  
    The downside to this is that most pages on the 
    Web are badly formed and don't validate.  
    Browser vendors have to accept this state of 
    affairs by making their software very forgiving 
    and unfussy.  Much of the code in browser software 
    is dedicated to handling ambiguous use of HTML 
    and trying to second-guess how authors want 
    their web pages rendered.  Thus, HTML's low 
    barrier to entry has been a mixed blessing 
    for the Web.

XML is an easy-to-use technology.  XML's ease of use is one of the
reasons that it has been adopted very quickly.  A downside of this is
that there is little reuse.  It's easy to create your own XML
vocabulary, so why bother using someone else's?  I see it time and time
again, people creating new XML vocabularies when there already exists
an XML vocabulary that does the same thing. The result is we end up
with a million XML vocabulary islands, which interoperate only by
creating complicated translation mechanisms, or don't interoperate at
all.  XML's low barrier to entry has been a mixed blessing for the Web.

Comments?

/Roger