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Re: It's too late to improve XML ... lessons learned?
- From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
- To: MURATA <eb2mmrt@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2021 15:30:49 +0000
Some features of XML (most notably XML entities) could have been removed from XML 1.0. But I do not think that entities (with the exception of internal parsed entities) have caused significant problems.
I think the security concerns over external parsed entities are probably one of the major factors that have led people to seek alternatives to XML.
In addition, DTDs and entities are an interoperability headache because many XML parsers chose not to implement that part of the spec,
In his Turing award lecture (1980), Tony Hoare wrote:
When any new language design project is nearing
completion, there is always a mad rush to get new
features added before standardization. The rush is mad
indeed, because it leads into a trap from which there is
no escape. A feature which is omitted can always be
added later, when its design and its implications are well
understood. A feature which is included before it is fully understood can never be removed later.
There's a lot of truth in this, but with XML we've learned that "adding features later" only works if all the popular implementations get updated; and there's no guarantee that will happen.
As regards the whitespace issue, I suspect the problem is that the SGML and XML designers never really imagined how popular XML would become for pure data interchange applications, where it's natural to assume that whitespace (as a sibling of an element node) is insignificant, which in turn means that tools reformatting XML by adding indentation tend to assume that whitespace can be freely added and removed.
Michael Kay Saxonica
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