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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Use cases for XML failure (was Re: #2 Re: [SML] Whether to support
 At 06:23 PM 11/27/1999 -0500, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote: >[...] >Come up with some use cases where XML simply *cannot* be deployed in a >handheld device [...] I don't think functionality is the issue. The issue is complexity, and complexity always comes at a price. My primary issues with XML have to do with its focus on markup for publishing. We use XML for data, and the XML spec forces XML-for-data engines to support XML-for-publishing requirements (eg. entities). We might do better focusing on data requirements and calling the language Data Markup Language (DML). Even so, Jon Bosak and the other initiators of XML are to be highly commended for creating a technology whose applicability reached far beyond its original intent, even if it isn't always a perfect match. If XML were truly a simple markup language, there would be little need for engineers to seek out someone else's parser in order to work with XML; writing the parser would be trivial. I have written an XML parser and know that doing so is a long and laborous task. And when you're done it takes countless tests to make sure you're truly compliant, and non-compliance issues always seem to pop up. XML is not simple. One might argue that once XML parsers are a commodity (as they are today, except for high performance parse tree generators), the simplicity of implementation becomes moot. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am forever answering questions for our employees and our customers about why you have to do certain things and about why you cannot do others. This is a huge waste of everybody's time; it shouldn't be that hard. Often of these complexities arise again when we design technologies that work with XML. Uh oh, attribute names and element type names are in different spaces, how do we represent two spaces and how do we address them? Uh oh, entity references are legitimate parts of a document, and sometimes people may need to work with them as a unit, so how do we give access to both the logical and physical representations. (Uh oh, an argument has just erupted on which pieces are logical and which physical and whether there really is a distinction at all.) Uh oh, I have to attach a value to a label, but I'm not sure whether to use content or an attribute value; I'll read up on the issue and ask our XML guru -- drats, all that research didn't help. Uh oh, these documents have CDATA sections are distinct children of the same parent element, and I don't know whether they must be distinctly addressable. Uh oh, I didn't realize that attributes are normalized; now I have to redesign my DTD using elements. Uh oh, this element contains mixed content, and I'm not sure which semantic labels, if any, apply to the text. (I would argue against allowing mixed content in DML; whitespace would be used only for pretty printing.) -- Joe Lapp (Looking for some good people to help design Senior Engineer and build the Internet's business-to-business webMethods, Inc. XML infrastructure. We are 100% Java.) jlapp@w... http://www.webMethods.com xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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