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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."
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.
It will probably be another 5, or 50, years before we know to what extent XML was the answer to the problem of data obsolescence and the degradation of old formats (like "bit rot", this is a handy but misleading way of framing the problem, which is not that the formats themselves degrade but that the supporting software infrastructure fragments, evolves or falls into disuse. The question with XML is then whether XML-encoded data will prove recoverable and intelligible after SAX, DOM, SOAP and all the rest have fallen into obscurity).
XML's self-description is one layer deep: data and metadata are packaged together. This layer can be seen as one layer of insulation against obsolescence: so long as the metadata remains meaningful, the meaning of the data can be ascertained and recovered. But the metadata is itself data, and if it too loses its meaning then it will be of no help at all.
For any data at all to have a semantic value it must have a context, and contexts change over time. XML is meant to ease the translation of data between contexts, but it cannot preserve meaning for all time.
Experience is a hard school, but fools will learn no other.
<reply type="flame">
<quote><text><sentence type="question" language="english"> I wonder what replacements are in development, if any?</sentence></text></quote>
<text><sentence type="answer" language="english">Hopefully a more compact format.</sentence></text>
</reply>
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