[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Typing and paranoia
On Thu, 5 Dec 2002 12:48:47 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) <clbullar@i...> wrote: > ++1. > > Here is the exemplar for that kind of thinking: [ a quote from Martin > Gudgin] > > "Philosophers have often asked the question, 'If a DOM tree sprouts, grows, > withers and dies and is never serialized using angle brackets, is it > XML?' [snip] <non-concrete-fuzzy-analogy CanIgnore="true"> Well, philosophers used to ask the question, 'is light was a wave or a particle.' The answer AFAIK is "both" or "neither" or "mu" or "I could tell you, but you'd have to understand quantum electrodynamics, and THAT would kill you". I think we'll come to the same point with respect to the XML syntax and infoset (very broadly defined) someday. Gudge is right, Len is right, both are right, and all are wrong ... there is an "XML QED" out there somewhere waiting to be discovered :-) </non-concrete-fuzzy-analogy> > > The urge to muddy what is platform and what is markup is a terrifying > problem. And Tim Bray said "it would be disastrous if you were able to advertise to some external party that you provide XML, and then offered anything but unicode-with-angle-brackets." Well, I don't think it's either terrifying or disastrous to have a menu of standardized infoset serializations available -- e.g., things like WikiML for human authoring, something like WBXML (what little I know of it) for constrained devices, something like serialized SAX events for high performance environments. I would totally agree that either calling an alternative "XML" without qualification would be stupid, but presumably this is a problem that HTTP content negotiation could handle easily if someone offered an alternative *standardized* "XML" serialization on their website. I see several scenarios for the future: One is that the alternatives become moot -- Office 11 makes XML GUI authoring ubiquitous, and Moore's Law makes the bandwidth and performance issues associated with the XML 1.x syntax trivial. Two is to legitimize the infoset- centric view of "XML" and have a manageable number of alternative syntaxes (with MIME registrations, etc. etc. to keep the Web sane). Three is that people take option 2 without the blessing of the W3C, simply because they can't afford the overhead of the unicode tags, etc. in their constrained or high-performance environments, and we have real chaos. I guess Four is that the Next Big Thing that replaces XML for the "data" world finds a better balance between human readability and machine processability. People here seem to believe that Gates and Moore will save our butts :-) That's not the impression I get on web services-oriented and middleware-oriented developers, but I don't have enough first hand knowledge to judge. I would think that the prudent thing is to explore option Two, because I don't like Three at all, and Four has not appeared on the horizon yet.
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|