[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML is boring (was Re: coming clean with the SGML crowd)
Re: various postings on the subject (all worthy and none, remarkably, angry or even disagreeable).... I believe the main obstacle to XML's mass acceptance -- to its being understood as non-boring, at least for the nonce -- is that what it seems (to me) to be best at is not something the masses are clamoring for. **** XML as a tool for presenting structured documents on the Web: "Gee, that's great. How can I *see* the documents thereby presented?" Although the absence of a general-purpose XML-aware Web browser can be derided as not worthy of XML's promise, it's also the case that for [insert huge fraction here] of Web users, the Web *IS* their browser. Almost nobody opens up a book and exclaims, "Hot damn! I'm so happy this was printed using offset technology instead of hot metal!" (even though the importance of the printing technology is profound in many "invisible" ways); for them, the content and the means of delivery are indistinguishable. If XML is never capable of being rendered through a mass-market browser -- either directly, or via CSS/XSL post-processing of the XML itself -- it just plain ain't gonna fly as a "structured document presenter for the Web." **** XML as a tool for data interchange and/or presenting structured data on the Web: My sympathies as a writer and Web developer lie with the "Why use XML for structured documents? I've got HTML for that" crowd, alluded to in the preceding paragraph. As a *developer*, however, I think the possibilities for XML as a data storage/interchange/mediation tool are indeed exciting. The problem here is that almost no one in the real world -- except other developers and related technoid types -- gives a hoot about data storage/interchange/mediation. Give someone a complete desktop office suite and I'd be willing to bet that the DBMS is the very last component they'll ever run (if they ever run it at all). Instead, they use what they already know (or can hack their way to from what they know) -- from mail-merge word processing files through kludged-up spreadsheets that they (or worse, the suite vendors) mislabel "databases." OTOH, if you put a nifty database-based product in someone's hands and don't tell them it's database-based, they'll swoon over it... as long as it solves a problem that THEY care about. HTML is a general solution to a general problem, and hence the masses' (and the media's) excitement about it. XML is (potentially) a device for solving 50,000 specific problems. What makes it boring is that any given one of those specific problems is of interest to only one of a given 50,000 individual users. I guess you could come up with a general-purpose XML application that would be one interesting thing to all potential consumers, but it would probably be so lightweight as to make everybody wonder what all the fuss was about. I'm an optimist, too. But I think it's important to focus on the things worth being optimistic about, and not be distracted by the natural human tendency to want to share everything that excites *us* with everyone we meet. (I had an uncle who used to talk like that; his value as a dinner companion consisted entirely of his helping us all appreciate how late it was, how late it had been since he last paused for breath in fact, and we really needed to be running now thankyouverymuch. Not that we didn't love him all the same, but still....) So that's another two cents to add to the gleaming (and still growing) mound of copper <g>. ============================================================= John E. Simpson | It's no disgrace t'be poor, simpson@p... | but it might as well be. | -- "Kin" Hubbard 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/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe 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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