"Bob Myers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Many of those complaining about XML don't seem to really know too > much about it.
The problem with XML is, that most people using it don't know anything about it and possible alternatives, using XML for everything, even when there are better alternatives available. XML as an technologie is not very interesting because it doesn't solve any problem, that wasn't solved before. The single advantage of XML is quite a bit of libraries and tools (but hey, there are formats with much more available libraries and tools, say S-Expressions) and that XML is taught to everyone today. By the way, XML does have quite some overhead and there are many platforms like embedded systems, where handling XML is much too expensive. And there is also quite some processing overhead at runtime. Not very much for a single application on modern PC hardware, but there is a cost and there are alternatives in most cases that gives you everything that XML gives you without those additional costs. So it's always good to know your tools and there alternatives. XML for everything ist just brain-dead. > Griping that it's too big is roughly equivalent to wanting to go > back to six-bit character encodings. That's bullshit. There are file formats with all possibilities of XML but without overhead. If you use XML only via tools and everyone knows, it's not humand readable, why not use binary formats? Yes, you can use XML and compress it, but only on disk. In memory you still have all this overhead and quite some big and complex libraries. > The point is that XML offers an incredibly rich environment of > transformability and extensibility and interoperability. S-Expressions offers an much richer environment of transformability and extensibility and interoperability. So what? > a well-established format such as Dublin Core or an extension > thereof To embed metadata of any standard in a file format you don't have to use XML. > In addition, XML has a built-in mechanism for extending vocabularies > (namespaces). This allows information specific to a particular > application to be included in a document, with well-understood > characteristics that allow other applications to ignore the extra > stuff. The problem is not the syntax, that's easy and solved long ago in various other formats. Nothing new here. The real problem is semantics and there XML is of no help. Yes, XML has it's uses. It's a reasonable format for technical documents and that's why DocBook is really nice (if you really need different representations -- I would never use it if I have only need for one representation, say papers in journals; in this cases specialized format like LaTeX are much more powerful and expressive and also easier to handle). And in quite some cases XML does a good job as intermediate format for data exchange (but is often quite a mess as wire format in network protocols -- worst of two worlds in this case). > As someone pointed out, using XML would lay to rest once and for all > any questions about character encodings. Huh? You think this would only be possible with XML? It's a really simple problem with quite some solutions, all much simpler than running to XML. > Many people think of XML documents only as text files, but in fact > they can take any form, including being stored in databases which > are optimized for performance in executing e.g. XQuery > queries. Oh yes, go back in time to the 1960. Yea, hierachical databases rules, relational databases do suck so hard. Wait? When and why are RDBMS developed? Hmmm... there were problems with hierachical databases? But XML is so cool, there can't be any problems or drawbacks with all these cool tools available... > What we need is a new format defined ground-up from an XML > perspective. Please, noooo! -- Until the next mail..., Stefan.
pgpDD73fn0wAG.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
