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[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?
 Is a Swiss Army knife (SGML) over-engineered compared to a knife and fork (XML)? For the people who need to do complex things, no. For the people who need to do a few simple things, yes. And are knives and forks over-engineered compared to chopsticks (CSV?)? Does the fact that much of the world gets by with chopsticks "prove" that knives and forks are over-engineered? In the future, when we all use sporks, would that prove that knives and forks were not up to the job, or just that we had all fallen prey to honey-lipped spork salesmen? To me, these are not remotely objective questions: all they do is provide a MacGuffin for our individual personality traits. A person who likes to minimise the chance of their peas falling off the plate will choose a knife and fork, and consider themselves smart; a more visionary person may say the answer is to create a specialized fork-shovel, and be frustrated that it isnt obvious to all; a more root-cause thinker may say that the real problem is serving peas on distant plates when they should be in small cups we can pour into our mouths; another may think that the problem is a non-problem if the cook just made chopstick-friendly pea patties. But what makes little sense, to me, is to call something "over-engineered" for a scenario it was not engineered for in the first place. "Too complicated for this" or "not powerful enough for that" and so on are adequate terms. A thing can be called "engineered" if it came about through certain disciplined and lesson-learning human activities, applying science and rigour to a technical goal: it is not a property of the thing but its history, how it was made. Few things can be considered "over engineered", by that definition. Rick On Wed, 15 Sep. 2021, 08:49 Roger L Costello, <costello@mitre.org> wrote: Michael Kay wrote: 
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