Celebrate the XML Decade

IdaAshley writes "IBM Systems Journal recently published an issue dedicated to XML's 10th anniversary. Take a look at XML application techniques, and general discussion of the technical, economic and even cultural effects of XML. Learn why XML has been successful, and what it would take for XML to continue its success."

Why XML was successful

[Ant P.]

Marketing to PHBs, mostly.

However here on earth a lot of people still hand-code the stuff. IMO a C-like syntax using nested {}s would've been better.

news flash

[User 956]

Take a look at XML application techniques, and general discussion of the technical, economic and even cultural effects of XML.

Cultural Effects? This is a spec for structuring data, not a Picasso.

Re:Why XML was successful

[porkThreeWays]

Sorta... XML came at a time when there weren't a whole lot of good viable data representation standards. Those that did (i.e. SGML) were too complicated for light use. XML was meant to be used by the masses while still technically remain an SGML subset. We have better alternatives today, but once something is in widespread use, it's not going away for awhile.

Stuck

[Duncan3]

So we're officially stuck with this crap forever.

Yay! Lets party!

XML is for data interchange, nothing else. Unfortunately, it's being used for everything but.

Re:JSON itself is still quite bloated.

[Duhavid]

Not all XML is readable by humans.

The formatting strings in Janus controls come to mind.

I have heard that the new Office format (XML) was pretty unreadable.

And what is with modding everything in this thread to zero.

Re:Why XML was successful

[smallpaul]

A curly brace syntax would have been a better format for "large scale enterprise publishing"? As someone who has spent more than a decade in that field, I must disagree strongly. A curly brace would have been better to allow enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. [w3.org] Please do not confuse what XML is used for with what it was designed for. There is a reason that XML delivery units are called "documents" and not "messages".

a decade of ...

[The Pim]

vague semantics, confusing specifications, unwarranted complexity, standards proliferation, poor tools, and wildly inappropriate application. Not to mention rampant disregard for existing work in nearly every arena it entered. So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well. [bell-labs.com]

Re:a decade of ...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd rather use SGML be my guest. XML solves the problem of beeing a simple to use subset of SGML very well.

Re:Why XML was successful

[Anonymous Coward]

Separating out human-readableness is fine in theory, but in practice having the lowest-level data in an easy-to-read format proves invaluable from time to time.

Developing a widget that connects to another XML-spewing widget using an XML-reader is all well and good when everyone behaves. But more often than should happen, the other widget uses some syntax or formatting that's improper XML or your XML-reader-editor can't handle a particular case it uses. Yes, in a perfect world, both of these would follow the standard perfectly and you'd never have to look at the formatting, but when I'm getting paid to code, I often don't have the time or access to the source code to make everything else perfect, and just need to make my code work. If that means relying on notepad on a client's computer, XML's human readability becomes more valuable to me than any presentation-encoding separation.

-TheJorge, posting AC from a friend's computer because firefox saved my password long ago and I can't remember it...

Re:Why XML was successful

[thsths]

> So, the redundancy of end tags in XML is there because, in practice, if you didn't have it, we had learned that our users had problems correcting their documents, and we knew that, in general, it was only rarely possible for software to give the users much help. There were some experiments early on with , allowed by SGML (with various options set) to end any element; it soon became obvious that this caused more problems than it was worth, and even Microsoft disabled the troublesome feature in their XML parser.

Given my experience with users that have inadequate support in their editor for structured documents, having the redundancy actually does not help. Sure, you get an error message instead of accidentally specifying something you did not wont, but the error message does not help people all that much. So they still stare at the XML and don't get what is wrong.

Allowing comments within an element (for each attribute) would have been a huge contribution to legibility. Of course that depends on how you use it, but I think attributes get a lot of use exactly because they have less redundancy.

My conclusion is that in the end, you need structured tools for structured data. And so the format does not actually have to be easy to read. (And believe me, even the best of XML documents are not easy to read if the structure is reasonably complicated.)

Re:Celebrate the XML Decade

[Dahamma]

Someone put that in our Bugzilla quips a while back - it's still one of my favorites!

My conspiracy theory is that XML was secretly invented by Intel in order to require 3GHz processors for the simplest of tasks.

Re:Stuck

[l0b0]

XML is for data interchange, nothing else.

Isn't all data interchanged? From client to server, from blogger to browser, from developer to developer, etc. Any data which is not interchanged is either useless or forgotten. And XML has shown its strength in all these areas: Ease of human and computer parsing.

Re:Why XML was successful

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't do web development or Windows work, so I don't see a lot of "documents" in XML. However I do see XML misused in strange way. On embedded systems, where memory is scarce and processing is slow, XML may be used to store a mere list of file names, or a "key=value" list that is trivial to parse without the overhead of an XML library. I've seen XML used to store project configuration details that is not intended for interchange, is nearly unreadable by humans, and which is useless without the original app (contrary to what I believe was the intent of XML). I've also seen apps with more than one XML library linked in.

I believe there are just a lot of programmers out there for whom XML is their primary tool in their kit, and don't know how to use more appropriate tools when the situation demands it. They have a hammer and all programming tasks look like nails. Maybe this is all a symptom of the "computers are fast and memory is cheap" disease which encourages programmers to be sloppy.

Maybe part of the XML legacy is yet more proof that people will misuse tools they are given. XML has become a checkoff buzzword; an app needs to support XML to make project leaders happy, not because XML is needed.