Wow! ...a voice of common sense (aka "Does the emperor really have any clothes on?")
XML is highly verbose. And what do we get for paying this price in data volume? Lowest common denominator interchange, readibility, and easy parsing. My rule of thumb is usually to use XML only where it is needed for data transfer (i.e. between two systems that have no other common protocol), human readability (i.e. config files, property files, etc.), or easy parsing (via SAXParser in Java). Other than that, although its cool to be using a new snazzy protocol, and it's great to have some common standards for interchange, I'd use other, more mature/optimized interchange protocols. -- Jeff -----Original Message----- From: Michael Winslow Czeiszperger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2003 1:11 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Juglist] What good is XML? On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 12:45 PM, Richard O. Hammer wrote: > Kenneth Sizer wrote: >> Not to play devil's advocate, but... >> Why is "Ideally all data, including that for static pages, is XML"?? >> What business/technical need is met by using XML for simple, static >> pages? >> (and, in reality, "marketing says customers will think that's cool" >> is often a valid business need) > > This touches something that is still an issue for me. I can't see why > XML has become so broadly used. > Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's store all of our data in *text files*! It'll be a great leap forward :-) Maybe I'm just getting too old to learn new tricks, but I too don't see the point of XML beyond using it for file storage like with OpenOffice. If an industry can come up with a standard definition for XML for use with its particular type of data that's nice, but beyond that. What's the point of using XML on a web-based project? Data is usually in a database, and if you need an abstraction layer on top of that, objects work just fine, wether its EJB or whatever abstraction you choose to use. Adding XML seems to not only add complexity and massive overhead, but doesn't seem to give you anything in return. The much vaulted separation of data from presentation you get with XML stylesheets has been around more than two decades in other architectures from XML came along, thank you very much. ________________________________________________________________________ _________ Run, run, run, as fast as you can. You can't catch me, I'm the stinky cheese man! -- michael at czeiszperger dot org, Chapel Hill, NC _______________________________________________ Juglist mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://trijug.org/mailman/listinfo/juglist_trijug.org _______________________________________________ Juglist mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://trijug.org/mailman/listinfo/juglist_trijug.org
