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Re: It's too late to improve XML ... lessons learned?

• From: Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2021 11:34:15 +0000

On 30/12/2021 09:25, Marcus Reichardt wrote:
> Isn't saying "the problem is that the SGML and XML designers never 
> really imagined how popular XML would become for pure data
> interchange applications" 

Do we have any measure of this? Compared — for example — with the number
of published objects (books, journals, articles, etc) from the
"document" use of XML? And how much of the "data" XML has now moved into
JSON?

> really just a reformulation for "XML was repurposed for data
> interchange when it was just meant as a markup language for encoding
> text"?

There is also a very wide spectrum of data interchange uses, from a
trivial 4-element design for a simple message, up to database dumps that
create 1024-character element type names in order to transport 4 bytes
of data. Is there any measure of the volumes of these?

> While I don't find using XML for data exchange terrible, I see a lot 
> of misconceptions stemming from this misuse. For example, the
> endless attributes-vs-elements usage discussion. 

I thought that one had gone away. I haven't fielded that question for
most of a decade. I suspect this is more indicative of the general
tendency towards unwillingness to RTFM.

> Or, in fact, proposing to remove entities - a markup language without
> even text macros would be laughed out of the room as an authoring
> language. 

I have even heard people seriously discussing the removal of PIs.

> XML's sin facilitating XXE was to allow unbounded entity expansion
> (when it otherwise put severe restriction on entities) while SGML has
> CAPACITY ENTLVL.
The push for getting rid of SGML legacy was the belief — which I think
we all shared at the time — that XML was for enabling the use of
SGML-type markup on the web without breaking backwards compatibility too
much. It pretty much satisfies that requirement now that CSS is up to
the formatting job, but browsers lost interest in XML long ago (actually
they were never much interested anyway).

Using XML for anything else, from an SGML-replacement for general
(non-web) publishing to a technique for data exchange is a by-product.
Data exchange was introduced half-way through the genesis of XML, if I
remember correctly, and may perhaps have seduced potential adopters more
than was good for them :-)

But it's mostly irrelevant at this stage; a historical warning about
standards development. If you want to exchange data nowadays, the trend
seems to be to use JSON, unless your processes are already using XML for
other purposes.

Peter

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: It's too late to improve XML ... lessons learned?
    • From: "Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@fromoldbooks.org>
  • Re: It's too late to improve XML ... lessons learned?
    • From: Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka@gmail.com>

• References:
  • Re: It's too late to improve XML ... lessons learned?
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
  • Re: It's too late to improve XML ... lessons learned?
    • From: Marcus Reichardt <u123724@gmail.com>