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Tim Bray On The Origin Of XML
gManZboy writes "Queue just posted an interview with XML co-inventor Tim Bray (currently at Sun Microsystems). Interestingly enough the interviewer is none other than database pioneer Jim Gray (currently at Microsoft). Among other things, in their discussion Tim reveals where the idea for XML actually came from: Tim's work on the OED at Waterloo."
TB And we missed. XML is a lot more complex than it really needs to be. It's just unkludgy enough to make it over the goal line. The burning issues? People were already starting to talk about using the Web for various kinds of machine-to-machine transactions and for doing a lot of automated processing of the things that were going through the pipes.
Amazingly, for such a popular method of 'communication' between and within applications, XML is admitted by most to be rather flawed and bulky...
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You know, the people who invented XML were a bunch of publishing technology geeks, and we really thought we were doing the smart document format for the future. Little did we know that it was going to be used for syndicated news feeds and purchase orders.
The most amazing thing is that back then in 1995-1996 at Open Text we were already using SGML as a data exchange protocol. All of us there (including Tim) ought to have known that XML would also have a life as a computer-to-computer communication protocol. Problem was that at the time so much of the SGML discourse was wrapped around the content versus format debate that we missed the obvious: the main of use of XML was not a replacement for HTML as a text format for the web, but as a kind of uber ASCII to allow the ready exchange of data between disimilar applications (just like ASCII in its time had eased the transfer of data between dismilar hardware and/or software platforms).
TB: I spent two years sitting on the Web consortium's technical architecture group, on the phone every week and face-to-face several times a year with Tim Berners-Lee. To this day, I remain fairly unconvinced of the core Semantic Web proposition.
Everyone who has actually done work on knowledge representation in the real world knows that this is a huge, difficult problem, unlikely to be solved anytime soon, as Tim Bray claims.
The only people who claim otherwise are either frauds or ignorant. The Semantic Web initiative has both: Tim Berners-Lee is very smart, but not a computer scientist, so he's not aware of the size of the challenge, plus he's a genuinely nice person, so he tends to trust others too much.
He has surrounded himself with the snake oil AI salesmen from the early 1980s who had promised us impending ubiquitous intelligent computers. Those fraudsters got found out back then, and spent the next fifteen years in academic limbo, only to be rescued by Tim Berners-Lee naivete.
Theirs is, in reality, a proprietory format, but to stay buzz-word compliant they use XML, which hurts performance -- sometimes dearly...
For example, to pass a couple of thousands of floating-point numbers from front end to a computation engine, each is converted to text string with something like <Parameter> around it. The giant strings (memory is cheap, right?) are kept in memory until the whole collection is ready to be sent out... The engine then parses the arriving XML and fills out the array of doubles for processing.
It really is disgusting, especially since freely available alternatives exist... For instance, PVM solved the problem of efficiently passing datasets between computers a decade ago, but nooo, we only studied XML in college -- and it is, like, really cool, dude...
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