Re: [xml-dev] seduced by markup

["Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@codalogic.com>]

I think it needs to be recognised that for many programmers XML (and their 
ilk) are just a means to an end.  The less time they can spend there the 
better.  They want to make lights flash, disks spin, dialogs appear etc.  So 
they figure "I need the option of different types here" so "I need 
polymorphism" and then they ask "how do I define a base class in XML to do 
polymorphism?"

Plus I think coding activity (at least traditionally) is all about 
organising stuff and constraining chaos.  Even on a good day, when you've 
dotted all your "I"s and crossed all your "T"s, things rarely go as well as 
you'd hope.  Thus when something with a "name" parameter is added to a 
system they want to quickly answer unequivocally "which name is that?" and 
bolt it down as quickly as possible to limit the increased entropy.  The XML 
practitioners approach seems to be "Yo, more names. Cool.  We'll put you 
over here to start with, but we might move you later."

Kind of like getting someone with OCD and a pot smoking hippy to work 
together!

Pete Cordell
Codalogic Ltd
C++ tools for C++ programmers, http://codalogic.com
Read & write XML in C++, http://www.xml2cpp.com
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
To: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Friday, November 15, 2013 5:58 PM
Subject: [xml-dev] seduced by markup


> I've been trying to figure out why I so deeply loathe the programmers who 
> regard markup as something to hide behind their tools, a mere lubricant to 
> the conversations they would have had anyway.
>
> It's not just XML - this is a constant problem in the HTML world as well. 
> Sometimes it leads to perverse programming styles within web applications, 
> and sometimes it leads to bizarre decision making by the people creating 
> browsers and standards.
>
> I think my problem - and it is _my_ problem - is that I spent too much 
> time looking at and enjoying markup before the rest of the world got 
> around to piling logic on top of it.
>
> In the early days of HTML, and even CSS, it became clear pretty quickly 
> that there were sane and insane ways to use markup.  Even when I was first 
> writing about Dynamic HTML, starting from a clean document made everything 
> so much easier.  (That's a key reason why XHTML got traction among at 
> least part of the Web community, too.)
>
> When I first got to XML, the markup was still primary and the processing 
> an afterthought.  Get the markup right, for many different values of 
> right, of course, and the processing will be manageable.
>
> At some point, maybe around the time of the Microsoft "he doesn't know 
> what XML is" ad, that story flipped.  XML was incredibly useful, but as 
> the servant of programmers.  XML structures suddenly had to look like 
> programming structures, because nothing else could be trusted.  They could 
> look a little different, because after all programmers from different 
> environments had different expectations, but Schemas and WSDL and similar 
> structured approaches dominated.
>
> (RDF also had a painful role in that story, inflicting URIs on XML 
> namespaces and leading to many thousands of unanswerable questions and 
> corner cases.  By the time the RDF folks had realized that XML's text 
> trees never really were a good fit for their abstract graphs, though, the 
> damage was done.)
>
> The data hygiene and mental hygiene of programming are not appropriate for 
> markup.  Programming and markup have connections, much like carpentry and 
> plumbing, but their best practices are very different.
>
> I suspect that the current brokenness of XML comes from markup values 
> having been buried under a pile of programming values, with XML Schema the 
> most visible landmark of that.  Programmers see schemas and expect XML to 
> conform to their expectations, but reality has never quite conformed.
>
> In any event, I'm well-aware that I'm losing this battle, on both the HTML 
> and XML fronts.  Whether it's single-page apps or schema-driven query 
> systems, programmers gotta program.  Much of the rest of my work is about 
> helping them do that.
>
> Still, I dream of a strange world where more folks actually recognized the 
> value of markup, of annotating text with structured labels that act as 
> guideposts.  It's useful stuff.
>
> (And I should note that my initial encounter with markup was via HyTime, 
> which I pretty instantly bounced off.  The models didn't connect clearly 
> enough to the text...)
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Simon St.Laurent
> http://simonstl.com/
>
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