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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Are XML's Good Ideas hidden? (was Re: Re: What are SchemasFor?
 someone I don't want to single out said: >Sorry, that should have been NET value. I have yet to see a schema >developed before a sample document. I have seen them automatically >generated by tools. I also think XML Schema is overly complicated and >the likelihood of misunderstanding is high given the complexity level. > >I mean, why is there short, long, int, and byte? Thats a physical >representation in what ought to be a logical description. Continued >reading of XML schema leaves me with a nasty taste. Clearly the >creators of this thing are C or Java programmers with limited >theoretical experience and no talent for real abstraction. >Really?!?!!?! XML 1.0 first edition was published in 1998. Surely >DTD's don't predate that. So I'm not buying that statement either. I must say I have mixed feelings about some of the rants in the last few days. On one hand I'm irritated that people just don't get it ... (e.g. being unaware of SGML, as the last quote indicates). And I'm feeling like this list has become infested with trolls lately, and I wonder if some regulars here are just rising to the bait rather than having reasonable discussions with people who genuinely want to understand what this XML stuff good for and not good for. But on the other hand it's kindof what I've feared for a long time: the essential simplicity and Good Ideas at the core of XML may be obscured by the Bad Ideas in the corners (WXS's numerous and confusing basic types arranged in a confusing hierarchy being my "favorite"). People see XML implicitly advertised by tool vendors as something that is too horrible for ordinary people to get their hands dirty with, and I'm sure that if the shipping version of Office 11 creates XML with every single word marked up, a LOT more people are going to run away screaming than will be motiviated to get our their Perl or Python tools and work with it. So, I'm curious: are the people who "just don't GET it" a disaffected minority who come here to have a good rant, or or the tip of the iceberg of submerged unhappiness with XML among real world developers? Looking around a bit, I stumbled on http://www.advogato.org/article/489.html "The problem with XML is that everything that operates on it is huge and complicated. That seems, in practice, to make most things that only use the format huge and complicated too. The reason for the complexity, if I understand it correctly, is unavoidable: everything that in compiler-land we do at compile-time, with XML we must do at runtime, and so to get tolerable performance demands great cleverness." [oh-oh, "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" comes on the radio ... gulp] Is is all over now, or is there some way to get out the word that XML really *is* simple and useful without all the layers and layers of hype, complexity, and drag-n-drop tools that exploit the power of XML for the benefit of vendors while denying its benefits to users? 
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