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Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

• To: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>
• Subject: Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 09:08:37 -0700
• Cc: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>,XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• References: <5.1.0.14.0.20020916100216.062d9008@n...> <E17qxyM-0005Tw-00@c...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Alaric B. Snell wrote:

[a whole lot of stuff]

I think one advantage XML offers over things like TSV and XDR is a 
certain measure of future-proofing.  Change your RDBMS data dictionary 
and TSV instances out the wild often become toast.  Same thing for XDR - 
in fact direct object serialization is almost always *wrong*.  Anyhow, 
because XML has all these verbose labels saying what each chunk is, it 
tends to be more change-resistant than most of what has come before.

Another big difference is the Unicode handling.  I think XML has a 
qualitatively healthier relationship with internationalized information 
than most other things out there.

The third one is the built-in explicitly written easy-to-understand 
easy-to-implement error-handing semantics.

There's other stuff, but for my money these are the three reasons why 
XML suddenly got traction where a lot of other well-designed stuff 
didn't.  None of them are absolutes, but put together they hit an 
important sweet spot. -Tim

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  • Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
  • Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
    • From: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>

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