[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Is XML for the peons or the gods? (was What is XML for?)
This last thread is very interesting because it brings up an entire debate which if not resolved could really dilute the momentum XML has today and bring it to the state of technologies like CORBA. A few years ago I like many other people were suckered into thinking that CORBA was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It even got dumped into the JDK (bad, bad, bad decision by JavaSoft). All of the technology pundits were preaching that it could be used for just about everything, pretty much the same list of items that people are preaching XML to be used for. In the end I scrapped use of CORBA for use as a dumb messaging layer in an application I had (using CORBA in the first place wasn't one of the most intelligent decisions I have made in my programming life but I was told by all of these "experts" that is was super hihg-performance and all of this other great stuff). That is not to say CORBA is a bad technology, but I was using it for all of the wrong reasons. CORBA now for all intensive purposes is dead in terms of momentum and most people I know of have totally lost interest in it altogether. The main CORBA list I am subscribed to which used to see the volume this list receives gets one or two messages posted to it a month (a good sign in my books that things are not going well for a technology). I am a little bit smarter now and see the same things happening to XML that happened with CORBA. I like XML for its simplicity and I wish it was a lot simpler and had some so-called "features" removed. The fact that XML was made to be SGML compatible I don't think does the world any favors since most people are planning on using XML for things which are the farthest removed from SGML. I do think you could do wonderful complex things on top of XML if you keep the standard spec simple (namespaces are something that is really a contradiction to simplicity, especially since all of the people to date that are defending namespaces cannot explain how to use namespaces in simple English). Then there is the camp who thinks that adding garbage like "Namespaces to XML" and other complicated issues directly into the XML spec is necessary because the most complicated computer science issues cannot be solved without them. In the end, all of these additions make supporting XML more difficult and far less useful to the "masses". So it basically boils down to is XML for a few really complicated tasks that require "gods" to implement, or is XML for a large set of general tasks that even "peons" can implement. No developer including myself wants to spend a ton of time learning and doing things with a technology that is going to die because the leaders of that technology are not sensitive to the needs of the underlings who actually use it. Tyler 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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