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

• From: "Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@fromoldbooks.org>
• To: Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2021 20:45:47 -0500

On Thu, 2021-12-30 at 11:34 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
> 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? 

There were some measurements done years and years ago in the "Binary
XML Characterization" Working Group, or whatever it was called,
chartered at W3C to work out if a binary transport for XML was a good
idea.

> 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?

Some (same place) along with e.g. a participant who had XML documents
that took 12 hours or more to parse, much of which time was spent
converting strings into floating point numbers.
> 
> I have even heard people seriously discussing the removal of PIs.
If you don't have DTDs i'm not sure you need PIs. At the time we made
XML i wanted a reserved xml element for metadata; people shouted that i
couldn't take away the xml element, which was later banned... and then
reinstated when it turned out it was widely used.


> > XML's sin facilitating XXE was to allow unbounded entity expansion
> > (when it otherwise put severe restriction on entities) while SGML
> > has CAPACITY ENTLVL.

Note that JavaScript was equally amenable to the "billion laughs"
attack, and that this was resolved by limiting the size of JavaScript
strings.

> 
> 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.

Linked Data has some merits. The biggest question beyond that for me
is, who is to be in control of the format of the data? If it's the
application developer at the receiving end, use JSON. If the data is to
be vendor-neutral and have a long lifespan, consider XML.

Best,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: It's too late to improve XML ... lessons learned?
    • From: Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>
  • Re: It's too late to improve XML ... lessons learned?
    • From: Damian Morris <damian@moso.com.au>

• 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>
  • Re: It's too late to improve XML ... lessons learned?
    • From: Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>