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Re: terra incognita

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: terra incognita
• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 13:06:33 -0500
• In-reply-to: <015d01c188b6$83299390$2cd0a340@paultx>
• Organization: Red Bridge Interactive, Inc.
• References: <5.1.0.14.2.20011216205651.02475de0@p...> <E16Gjtj-0003GE-00@s...> <015d01c188b6$83299390$2cd0a340@paultx>

On Wednesday 19 December 2001 12:56 pm, Paul T wrote:
> > That wasn't it's design point. I think XML has been forced into
> > situations that it wasn't designed for, and for which it is less than
> > ideal.
>
> I agree with Michael's letter, which is
> "... Ahh, but that's true of most technologies that really take off...."

Right, but as I said, things don't usually stay there: they evolve beyond the 
kludge, generally when the second or thrid generation solutions come along.

Also, I think market dynamics and international standards are somewhat at 
odds here. Market dynamics are exposing gaps in functionality that need to be 
filled for sure. The questions are whether you standardize on something poor 
and/or destabalize things for the sake or market dynamics. Maybe I'm still 
naive enough to believe that standards *can* be good technically and have 
widespread benefits (and in fact, I think Unicode and XML generally *are* 
good ;-)).

FWIW. I'm very happy to let SOAP/.Net/<whatever> happen. The problem is that 
people rush into standardization during the prototype phase, when few of the 
larger issues have become apparent, let alone been thought about. Let markets 
run, and then standardize what results... but in the process, don't the 
kludge on everyone else.

Adding control characters to XML for the sake of serialization is a knee-jerk 
reaction at best.

FWIW. I agree with you too: a small subset of XML should be designed for use 
in things like WebDAV etc. Call it something else and give it different 
rules. Maybe the XML encoding of ASN.1 is it, maybe not (especially as ASN.1 
is more about grammars).

• References:
  • Re: terra incognita
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Re: terra incognita
    • From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
  • Re: terra incognita
    • From: Paul T <pault12@p...>

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