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XML Turns 5
GiMP writes "According to the World Wide Web Consortium, XML turns 5 years old today. XML is used by many programs as a generic container for data. Applications range from websites, to word processor documents, to video games. It seems like only yesterday it was only a working-draft."
Horray for XML. Let's just home that it's embraced by more people as a universal data format and leads to greater openness in Computing!
In computing terms 5 years is quite a long time. I wonder what replacements are in development, if any?
Happy birthday XML, then?
Get any cool presents?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
XXML - Extensible extensible markup language. Allows you to extend and redefine the EBNF productions which define the XML syntax. Roll your own roll-your-own markup language. Compatible parsers are few and far between, but an experimental application called YACC is rumoured to have some of the required capabilities.
XXXML, or extensible extensible extensible markup language, is expected to undergo widespread early adoption by pr0n sites, as it permits a hitherto unimaginable flexibility in permutations and combinations of content...
Experience is a hard school, but fools will learn no other.
Free as in mason.
... and does anyone know for sure what it's good for yet ?!? :P
Well, even though "XML" doesn't obey proper grammatical rules, this Roman figures it to add up to one thousand forty.
Plus, most people know that 1040 is associated with April 15 (at least in the USA)..
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This article is just another reminder how young XML and its associated standards are. No wonder most people are confused about it.
Whenever I look at the last ten to fifteen years of computing history, I am utterly amazed. Think about this: during the Gulf War, with all its high-tech-ness, the best PCs were 386s or low-end 486s, and the best Sun workstations were the lower-end SPARCstations (i.e., perhaps a 40MHz CPU, probably 30MHz).
Whenever I see people who are totally overwhelmed by the almost unbounded number of buzzwords, platforms, and dozens of ways to accomplish the same task, I try to remember that nearly everything we take for granted today was popularized in the last decade (often just in the last five years, like XML). There is a quote in the Solaris Internals book that says there were 3000 UNIX systems in 1982 (or 83). There are several orders of magnitude more systems today. No other time in human history have we had to cope with this sort of change in so short a time.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
... there's still no easy way for XML to be used in C apps, frankly.
Seems to me this would've been good from the beginning. Sure, we've got things like libexpat, etc. but there's no really easy way to say, convert your C-style structs directly to XML constructs for easy streaming...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
and how old is XML's grandpa, SGML?
the idea of structured text isn't THAT new!!
Although XML may be full of potential, I and many others have found that XML 1.0 has carried significant baggage from the SGML document-centric world, and XML is being shoe-horned into service for data representation. The fact that there is even such a problem as "elements-vs-attributes" when trying to represent a simple value indicates that all is not well. All the standards built on top of XML 1.0 inherit its limitations. The first generation of the Web was originally designed by one person and used HTML, HTTP, and URI. It was quite simple and people adopted them because things were understandable. 10+ years later and we need 12+ languages to write a simple application. The collection of half-baked standards are a house of cards waiting for a small breeze to knock it down.
"Hopefully a more compact form."
And here, all this time I thought bigger was better.
In any case, this point always comes up. "XML is too verbose." But a certain amount of verbosity in programming is good (vis Python vs APL) though too much is bad (Cobol vs Java).
So is XML too verbose?
Given the right tools we could easily transform "<quote><text><sentence type="question" language="english">" reversably (thats important) to "<q><t><s t="q" l="e">" which certainly is less verbose. I'd be willing to bet that most XML DTDs/Schema would allow for most tags to be reduced to one or two alphabetic characters (that would be 700+ different elements). If thats too much you could build a simple tool defaulting the attributes, eliding the close "</...>" bits quoting unquoted attributes and so on. Which could give us "<q><t><s t=q>". Too verbose still? I could easily go a few steps further but won't.
In any case, the challenge for those who find XML verbose is to find an isomorphic representation. That is a representation R and transformations XR taking XML to the other representation and RX going the other way so that XR(RX(text)) = text that is less verbose. Lots of people will thank you I expect.
I think it is a sad conclusion that XML is here to stay, as it is not such a good format for which is intended and attempts to fix some of the flaws of XML by additional (and often contradicting) formalisms, have not made things better. XML basically can only represent a tree data-structure with named nodes and attributes. It does not have facilities to represent sorted and unsorted collections with key fields in a proper manner. It also lacks a mechanism for representing references between elements and it is rather poor with respect to the explicit definition of semantical properties of the data, and is very limited in the expression of additional constraints. I once made an effort to come up with something better myself. Please read this description for the details.
...I hope that XML doesn't wake up with a middle-aged hooker and a hangover like I did on mine.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
piling markup around your essential data doesn't really make your point, although it does give an interesting demo of the extensibility of the language.
if you had
I wonder what replacements are in development, if any
Hopefully a more compact format
Which seems like a more reasonable design, you can extend the semantic richness of your data as in the following manner.
I wonder what replacements are in development, if any
Hopefully a more compact format
This is of course only one of the possible uses, hence the term extensible. Probably anything as open ended as xml is lends itself to verbosity and bad design.