Re: [xml-dev] seduced by markup

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 11/15/13 11:48 PM, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> I see it like this:
>
> When you design an XML vocabulary, you are in control. You own your own
> data format. You are an information architect.
But this is rarely true.  Very very few people design XML vocabularies 
today, or will, in any model.  Even in my gothic model, completely new 
designs are unusual, though tweaks should be ordinary.

Unfortunately, XML took an early turn toward letting programmers rather 
than markup experts impose the expectations by which vocabularies are 
designed, and the result is crap for everyone.  Programmers suffer 
through markup.  Markup folks suffer through programming expectations 
and constraints that make little sense in markup.

(Except for those in the DTD and RELAX NG and schema-free diasporas, of 
course.  RELAX NG stands out as a bright and shining intersection where 
people took concepts from programming and asked how they applied to 
markup rather than the other way around.)

> When you use JSON, you are often in the role of a programmer, an
> application designer, and the JSON format you design is a reflection of
> the objects in your program. The program owns the data.
Yes, and they take full advantage of the likely transience of the 
formats they create.  As little as I like looking at JSON directly, they 
certainly built a world in which programmers can be programmers and talk 
with programmers about programming problems.  There are glitches, but no 
major shifts of worldview.

> When you use HTML, you are using a vocabulary designd primarily by Web
> browser people, and the Web browser is primary, not your data.
And this is the mistake of the web browser people, who now seem to have 
optimized their code so severely that they can't cope with element 
syntax rather than attribute syntax for things like responsive images.

I still have hope that Web Components et al. will free us from their 
constraints, but I'm curious whether the vendors will truly give up that 
much control over the browser.

> XML frees your information from being optimized for, and specific to,
> any one program. But the consequence of this is that it is not as
> convenient for the programmer. So programmers tend to dislike it.
>
> Further, programmers were forced early on to use the DOM to work with
> XML, and this was so unwieldy that almost anything else is better, even
> it forces you to wear shoes and socks.
>
> It's not a lost battle.
>
> Instead, we must move the battleground.
No.  We've done that over and over and over and over already.  We've 
wasted the last decade trying to make XML sound more appealing to 
programmers.  Can we stop pouring resources (almost all of the resources 
committed to XML tool development) down that hole?

> This is why, for example, XQuery is so interesting, because it straddles
> all the worlds. Where the XML DOM takes the programmer-unfriendly
> aspects of XML and forces the programmer to deal with them, XQuery hides
> many of them. I somethimes think that if we renamed XQuery as "Very Fast
> Forest Engine" (VFFE) it might become more popular, as the programmers
> might forget about their hatred and fear for the things they do not
> control (such as XML) in their sudden joy.
It exists, as Daniela noticed, in JSON, a completely appropriate place. 
I have indeed heard sudden joy around JSONiq.

> But for now at least yes, many programmers have good reasons to dislike
> XML, and it helps all of us in the XML world to understand these
> reasons.
We've understand the reasons for a very very long time.  Understanding 
the reasons and catering to them has accomplished less than nothing. 
We've poisoned XML while its relevance to programmers continually 
diminished.  It has not been a fruitful conversation.

Love the sinner doesn't mean "be sinful".

Thanks,
--
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/