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."

Comments

Semantic web snake oil...

[Alomex]

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.

Intra-vendor XML is (usually) stupid

[mi]

It drives me up the wall, that my employer is using XML to let parts of their own application communicate with other parts. DTDs are not used and all parts still need to be modified/recompiled whenever one of them changes. Same people maintain both ends of the communication.

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...