[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML is boring (long --- sorry)
I find all of this worrying about XML's place in the universe to be misdirected. XML is ASCII. You can ignore ASCII for a little while, but eventually you adopt it because it is so fundamentally simple, right and useful that it doesn't make any sense to continue with EBCDIC (or whatever else). Furthermore, XML has no competitors. PDF cannot do what XML can do. RTF cannot do it. PostScript cannot do it. HTML cannot do it. People are hyped about XML because they have been waiting for it without knowing that they were doing so. The first wave of XML users will be programmers. So? What's wrong with that. The second wave will be all of the corporations that should have adopted SGML before, but didn't. Nothing wrong with that either. Users will find XML invading their day-to-day computing just as they do Unicode and ASCII before it. That strikes me as fine. Now I know that Peter is in a little bit of a hurry. He wants his chemist peers to adopt XML as quickly as possible. Maybe hype would help them to do that. Maybe not. But with or without hype, they will eventually adopt XML (or some other SGML variant, if one ever arises) because there is no reasonable alternative. You can't encode molecules in PDF, HTML or even VRML. You could reinvent something LIKE XML, but why would you bother? Paul Prescod - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco The past is inaccurate. Whoever lives long enough knows how much what he had seen with his own eyes becomes overgrown with rumor, legend a magnifying or belittling hearsay. "It was not like that at all!" -- he would like to exclaim, but will not, for they would have seen only his moving lips without hearing his voice. - Czeslaw Milosz (translated) 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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