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

  • From: Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de>
  • To: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
  • Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2021 09:59:07 +0000 (UTC)

Re:  What does it mean to say that XML wasover-engineered?
Peas ... A beautiful post.

...
I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

Robert Frost






Am Mittwoch, 15. September 2021, 03:24:14 MESZ hat Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> Folgendes geschrieben:


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:

> Given that XML is over-engineered for many of the tasks
> that people were using it for, other standards better suited
> to a subset of those tasks were always going to emerge.

What does that mean, "over-engineered"? Does it mean, "too restrictive"? For example, XML does not allow two attributes with the same name to occur on an element. XML requires every start tag to have a matching end tag. Those are kind of restrictive. Is that what you mean by over-engineered? Or do you mean something else?

/Roger

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