On Dec 08, 2005, at 20:26, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> [The following statement is somewhat heretical on this mailing
> list, but
> that's never stopped me before ;)]
It's not heretical, a lot of people see XML as a checklist feature
and don't pause to consider the advantages.
> Why does a file format/specification simply being based on XML
> make
> it better than one that isn't?
It's not enough to be better, but given two close feature-sets it's
definitely a big plus. One of the major wins of XML is that you can
always manipulate it easily, and that there are thousands of tools
and related technologies out there. Thanks to SVG being in XML, I can
use all skills that I already have: DOM, XSLT, XPath, XQuery,
RelaxNG, Perl XML modules -- the list goes on and on. Every time someone
introduces an extra XML language, all that I have to learn is what is
*specific* to that language, nothing else. With other formats, you
also have to pick up the tools, the quirks, the modes of publishing,
etc.. Additionally, XML integrates smoothly with whatever
infrastructure you have in place in your company or just on your
computer.
Contrast this with Flash or PDF. Have you ever tried to get
information out of these formats? You can either use commercial tools
or you can try one of the open source implementations. Some are
better than others, but in most cases it's still amazingly painful to
do anything with it. The specifications may be open, but it's still
the case that once you put your data in one of those formats, you've
pretty much locked it up for good. Likewise, producing PDF or SWF
programmatically is infinitely harder than with XML formats.
I don't trust MS much about the openness of Metro, but given a choice
between that and PDF I will produce Metro documents any day of the
week and run away screaming from PDF.
> PDF is a published (open?) specification originally from Adobe
> that
> is not based on XML. However, PDF has been adopted as the basis
> for a
> series of standards from the International Standards Organization
> (ISO)
> including ISO 15930, PDF/X and ISO 19005, PDF/A. That makes it
> TOTALLY
> OPEN and INTERNATIONALLY approved.
Being an ISO standard can be a useful selling argument, but given how
terribly bad some ISO specs are it's certainly not a guarantee of
quality :)
--
Robin Berjon
Senior Research Scientist
Expway, http://expway.com/
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