Re: [xml-dev] What does it mean to say that XML was over-engineered?

From
Ihe Onwuka <>
To
Roger L Costello <>
Date
2021-09-15T00:33:34Z
ID
<>
Thread
Re: [xml-dev] What does it mean to say that XML was over-engineered?
The word itself means a bunch of things. 

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/288146/what-is-the-difference-between-overengineering-underengineering-and-rightengine

To me if a technology allows you to ignore i.e does not forcibly or otherwise expose you to the bits of it that you don't need it is not over-engineered.

OTOH Exhibit 1 of overengineered tech IMO are languages that force you to define a class in order to write "hello world" 

I have always perceived XML as a scalable rather than over-engineered technology as the only concept  it forces on you is well-formedness and every syntax has some grammar rules.

I prefer it to under-engineered technologies where you have to start importing libraries to handle  basic everyday features like parsing delimited files, or regex. 


On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 6:49 PM Roger L Costello <[email protected]> wrote:
Michael Kay wrote:

> Given that XML is over-engineered for many of the tasks
> that people were using it for, other standards better suited
> to a subset of those tasks were always going to emerge.

What does that mean, "over-engineered"? Does it mean, "too restrictive"? For example, XML does not allow two attributes with the same name to occur on an element. XML requires every start tag to have a matching end tag. Those are kind of restrictive. Is that what you mean by over-engineered? Or do you mean something else?

/Roger

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