[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] An easy-to-use technology is a double-edged sword (XML is an easy-to-us
Hi Folks, In his book, DOM Scripting, Jeremy Keith notes that an easy-to-use technology is a double-edged sword: A technology that people can speedily and easily use will probably be adopted very quickly. However, there is likely to be a correspondingly low level of quality control. For example, HTML's ease of use is one of the reasons behind the explosive growth of the Web. Anyone can learn the basics of HTML in a short space of time and create a web page very quickly. It's even possible to use WYSIWYG editors to make web pages without ever seeing a line of markup. The downside to this is that most pages on the Web are badly formed and don't validate. Browser vendors have to accept this state of affairs by making their software very forgiving and unfussy. Much of the code in browser software is dedicated to handling ambiguous use of HTML and trying to second-guess how authors want their web pages rendered. Thus, HTML's low barrier to entry has been a mixed blessing for the Web. XML is an easy-to-use technology. XML's ease of use is one of the reasons that it has been adopted very quickly. A downside of this is that there is little reuse. It's easy to create your own XML vocabulary, so why bother using someone else's? I see it time and time again, people creating new XML vocabularies when there already exists an XML vocabulary that does the same thing. The result is we end up with a million XML vocabulary islands, which interoperate only by creating complicated translation mechanisms, or don't interoperate at all. XML's low barrier to entry has been a mixed blessing for the Web. Comments? /Roger
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