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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] terra incognita
 On my way back from XML 2001, I started thinking about the conference I'd just seen and how exactly I landed in XML. Wandering through a bunch of different loosely-connected ideas, I started thinking that XML and markup in general - including and perhaps especially SGML - simply doesn't fit well with a huge amount of what the rest of computing wants to believe. I'm sure this is obvious to some people but may be worth exploring in a little more detail for others. Labeled and hierarchically structured information seems very useful to XML folks, and it's pretty simple to work with as XML. Put those labeled hierarchies into another framework - say, objects or relational databases - and suddenly what was simple gets complicated very quickly. XML seems to encourage a diversity of data structures (even within the same document) which don't echo the relative conformity of both object and relational structures. The notion that representation is as important as underlying structure, which XML's syntactic rules make fairly explicit, is deeply alien to the Platonic view of information that many programmers seem to share. The notion that lexical structure might be as important as the underlying information is one that even this community frequently has difficulty with, but it seems to be at the foundation of XML 1.0. The separation of content from presentation (or processing) in XML seems to work okay with similar notions in relational databases, but goes against much of the grain of object-oriented development. In developing MOE as a set of objects whose only behaviors are intended to be utilities for carrying the data they hold, I'm keeping data and logic at arms length wherever possible. I'm avoiding OOP concepts like polymorphism to the extent that I can, preferring to let features like the location in a structure have priority over the actual class type in determining behavior. I'm not sure that any of this is new or unusual - most of it's probably obvious to a lot of people. On the other hand, it explains a lot of my visceral reaction to things like W3C XML Schema which seem to impose a universe disconnected from markup onto markup itself. It also explains a lot of my resistance to "Web Services", which feel to me like an effort to use XML while continuing to program in older ways which have no interest in what XML might bring to the table. I'm hoping that if we're really lucky, this community and others might notice that markup seems to bring its own agenda, and that more than bits and bytes are at stake here. I treasure XML's flexibility and its insistence on a core set of labeled structures, and wonder if maybe it's time to take that seriously, rather than whatever received notions of objects or databases we may have inherited. Maybe I've been working in the XML trenches too long, but it seems like maybe it's time to say "XML is different from the rest of what you've been working on, and we should take that seriously" rather than pretending that XML is simply glue for other technologies. This may not be easy to sell to customers, but it may help us solve their problems. -- Simon St.Laurent "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue 
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