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

Re: What does it mean to say that XML was over-engineered?

• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@ibiblio.org>
• To: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2021 11:51:37 +0000

On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 11:10 PM Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:
>
> By over-engineered I mean that it has more functionality than most applications require.
>
> Things like DTDs, namespaces, processing instructions, which add substantial complexity to applications and APIs whether you use them or not.
>

DTDs don't really bother me. Internal DTD subsets are where the
problems arise. If we had stuck to external DTDs that were only
optionally processed and predefined all the HTML entity references, a
lot of problems would go away. Also minimal parsers would be much
simpler and possibly faster.

Processing instructions maybe aren't needed but don't cause a huge
amount of problems.

Namespaces are necessary but almost certainly could have been done better.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@ibiblio.org

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: What does it mean to say that XML was over-engineered?
    • From: Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>

• References:
  • What does it mean to say that XML was over-engineered?
    • From: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: What does it mean to say that XML was over-engineered?
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>