size of XQuery developer community

[A. Steven Anderson]

With all due respect, one major reason why XML/XQuery/XSLT isn't as popular
as many other programming languages has less to do with ignorance of it's
capabilities and more to do with it's 1) lack of performance, 2) overall
information bloat, and 3) unintuitive language constructs.

Sure disk space is cheap and bandwidth is getting more *broad* every day,
and "many elegant designs have been sacrificed for the sake of
performance...yada...yada...yada...", but at the end of the day, the same
data that can be represented in XML can be represented a lot more concise in
other platform-independent formats.  I won't even get into the whole
information density argument which can be Googled.

It's been my experience (19+ years of professional software development)
that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution.  i.e. my tool belt has more
than just a hammer. ;-)


On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Hans-Juergen Rennau <http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk>wrote:

> Hello Michael,
>
> of course you are right in that XSLT and XQuery are built on the XDM, not
> on XML as a serialization format, and you are right in that the XDM can be
> completely separated from the serialization format. But I prefer to view XML
> and the XDM as one organic whole, and exactly this is what I meant by the
> term "deep understanding": an understanding covering three _levels_ of XML:
> level #1: the lexical; level #2: the inforset (= structural model totally
> unconcerned with aspects of processing); level #3: the XDM extending the
> infoset in order to embrace the reality of processing = a global information
> model which preserves the structural achievements of the infoset and embeds
> it into a stunningly flexible definition of information value. Each level
> evolved from the previous one, I think, was it not so, historically?
>
> This evolution is a wonderful achievement, and I am emphatically against
> "marketing" XQuery and XSLT as tree processing languages, as if you could
> come along with some tree and get it processed. What should be done is
> rather: encourage people to get familiar with the new reality which XML (via
> XDM) constitutes: a global information model of stunning power and
> flexibility, enabling XPath, XSLT, XQuery and what is to come.
>
> A poet (Joseph Brodsky) once wrote: it is not so that the poets should
> adopt the language of the masses; common people should adopt the language of
> literature. In the realm of IT, XDM/XPath/XSLT/XQuery are like literature,
> and I would not sell them for something else.
>

-- 
A. Steven Anderson
Independent Consultant
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