[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: What is XML For?

• To: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>
• Subject: Re: What is XML For?
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 09:12:10 -0700
• Cc: "'The Deviants'" <xml-dev@l...>
• References: <001301c27e33$c775e760$6a31812f@mooncat> <E1866Fr-00059N-00@c...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Alaric B. Snell wrote:
>...

> 
> Because XML has a fragile data model, designed for publishing stuff to a 
> browser rather than transfer between applications? 

XML is based on SGML which was invented long before browsers as we know 
them.

> ... In HTML you just ignored 
> unknown tags, which was fine because the text inside would still be rendered 
> just maybe without the desired styling. With XML they made everything more 
> fragile, it had to conform to a DTD, but your document supplier could 
> suddenly start supplying documents with a different DTD and as long as they 
> XSLT pointed at by <?xml-stylesheet?> was also changed to work with the new 
> DTD it'd still work OK. It's aimed more at displaying data to people than for 
> interchange of information between bits of software... I'm still trying to 
> find out where the 'XML data' idea first arose.

It arises naturally from the observation that structured data (tuple 
structured, hieararchically structured, graph structured, recursive) is 
a subset of the kinds of data you will find in the documents XML was 
designed to handle. A telephone book is tuple-structured. An airplane 
manual is mostly hierarchically structured but with frequent escapes to 
graph structure. There is no boundary between data and documents but of 
course there may be a point on the spectrum where XML produces small 
benefit (e.g. if CSV is all you need). At that point you might use XML 
merely to leverage the existence of XML-aware tools. If you don't need 
them then you probably don't need XML.

  Paul Prescod

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: What is XML For?
    • From: Alaric Snell <alaric@a...>

• References:
  • RE: What is XML For?
    • From: "Martin Soukup" <martin@d...>
  • Re: What is XML For?
    • From: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>

• Prev by Date: [ANN] XMLNewbies Mailing List
• Next by Date: RE: What is XML For?
• Previous by thread: Re: What is XML For?
• Next by thread: Re: What is XML For?
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread