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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."
We all know Microsoft invented XML, how else could have filed a patent for it:)
< td padding="5px" > I'm < td >
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
I think it's very funny that XML looks like it is based on SGML.
But according to the interview, it seems that the similarities are merely coincidental.
How's that old saying go?
Those that do not understand Lisp are doomed to reinvent it, badly.
Why can't someone reinvent C so that it sucks less?
From the "Jim Gray" link:
Jim Gray is a "Distinguished Engineer" in Microsoft's Scaleable Servers Research Group and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC).
OK, Xerox has their famous Palo Alto Reseach Center (PARC), so Microsoft just has to have its own similarly named center in the same general vicinity. Sheesh!
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SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks Tim, the world owes you one!
But okay you're right, you gotta use those CPU cycles for something...
--Don't give the world what it asks for, but what it needs.
I was damned by [GNU Project founder] Richard Stallman in egregiously profane language for working on it.
Why do I not find this hard to believe...
"database pioneer ... (currently at Microsoft)"
translated for slashdot readers:
"sellout"
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...
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Gray interviews Bray, should have done it in May. Over by the bay.
Is the my karma burning? Oh what the hay.
That's hogwash. Everyone knows that the idea for XML came from the tablets of stone that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. In these tablets were the beginnings of self-describing data. That alone was where the commandments of W3C was originally sent out to the world.
But only in the last decade have scholars used transformation style sheets and super-computers to find more declarative complex types, hidden in the original Hebrew CDATA. It is thought there are tens if not hundreds of specifications in these texts that may never have a finalized draft.
Progress has been slow, while the discovery of SOAP in the 1800's has made the hygiene of data possible, there much that has yet to be standardized. Considering the aging DTD schemas left from the era of King James, it will be crucial to the data-exchange of humanity to uncover more secrets of XML.
I work with XML every day. And every day I wonder the same thing: why the hell does the end tag name have to be repeated? Why can't it just be optional? In other words, why can't it just be abbreviated as: <tagname>data</> ?
Oh MAN I wish they could have done just that one little thing for us. It would cut our datagram size down by at least 30%, maybe more.
Have you ever seen these guys in the same room at the same time? No? I thought as much.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
why the hell does the end tag name have to be repeated?
Because that is the single biggest source of headaches in parsing SGML, the precursor of XML, in which such a construct is allowed.
It also makes error recovery very difficult, something that we know is quite important from all that malformed HTML code out there. The XML creators knew that too.
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...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think XML should have looked more like this:
Yeah that'd work great if you knew 100% of the time that you'd never get bad data. If you've got a multi-nested element hierarchy however and you lose one or two of your , how do you know where to put them back in? It's very easy to look for an opening tag followed by a closing tag of the same name, especially when building a parser that error-checks.
e ment>
You know what would cut down the datagram size more? Smaller tag names. Tag names don't have to be readable so much as uniquely identifiable; you can use an interface layer in the editor to make the tag names user friendly and then de-friendify them for transit. Then you've got:
<a>
<b>woo</b>
</a>
insted of:
<element>
<subelement>woo</subelement>
</el
According to wc, switching to single-character element names instead of the multicharacter ones would give a 41% reduction in bulk, for the example above.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Lots of people have thought about it. Not Very Insightful.
The reason is that if the parser encounters unbalanced end-tags, and they're all just </>, the parser will go farther and get very confused before it dies.
It will be very difficult to pinpoint *which* tag isn't closed, like C's optional {} after an if(), or SGML's optional closing tags.
It's much easier to correct if your parser can say "You forgot to close <account> on line 115" rather than "Something or other is unbalanced somewhere before line 224."
I've heard this quote in relation to XML before, and I don't get it. LISP is a programming language. XML is a method for storing data. About the only relation between the two that I can find is that both use nesting. So, why does this get brought up whenever XML is being discussed?
Because it would make spotting your bug harder. Did you _mean_ to close that tag, or did you think you were closing a different tag? If all closing tags look the same it would make tracing certain bugs harder.
My Journal
when i work with XML in java, i generally use just pass the XML through a GZIP stream. need to see the file contents? zcat. XML compresses well since it's repetative text. Lately I've been doing a lot of XUL code with PHP/smarty as the back-end, and again, I transparently gzip this...
So, this solves the problem of the size of the XML to be stored on disk or transmitted over network... The only difference is parsing. Again, when i'm in java, i use PICCOLO to parse the XML -- it uses a lexical analyzer (jflex?) to parse XML more like a compiler parses code, by tokenizing it. turns out, this is really fast.
Disk space is cheap. CPU's are fast. Mainstream XML parsing technology can always be made faster. Why must we abandon our beloved, human-readable, standardized format for files and protocols alike in favor of binary files?
< ele1> < ele2> < ele3> < /> < /> < ele4> < ele5> < /> < />
/ele3> < /ele1> < ele4> < ele5> < /ele5> < /ele4>
Which element did I forget to close?
< ele1> < ele2> < ele3> <
Clearer now?
also known as: BARF. The name was changed, no
doubt, in order to instill a greater sense among
MSFT employees there that they actually might
(someday) have a workable product. Hence, BARC.
XML is more complicated than it should be, but
it is NOT a MSFT "invention", and has no business
being patented by MSFT. Let alone, encumbered
with their viral and restrictive and expensive
licensing scheme. What it IS is yet another
example of the slimey "embrace/extend/extinguish"
monopolistic business practices of MSFT. If the
DoJ weren't more like a 90 year old grandmother
that misplaced her full dentures (aka the Dubya
regime), they would have MSFT back into court to
exact "new & improved" punishment on the 800 lb.
gorilla.
"The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well." -- Phil Wadler
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
"Hmmm, OED might be unclear to tons of people reading this, I'll make them have to click on a link to know what I'm talking about."
Obligatory relation to discussion content:
Providing a link instead of writing a clear summary is choosing the wrong tool for the task at hand. Authors of some other comments in this thread have shown that XML also is the wrong tool for many of the tasks to which it is applied. Whether it's passing data internally within an application or summarizing an article for the homepage, choosing the right alternative can make a difference between efficient clarity and an inelegant kludge.
Applying the right algorithmic tool to the right problem is actually a focus of CS. This is why sorting routines are often studied -- for instance, a routine which is more efficient at sorting millions of unordered pieces of data may be very wasteful when dealing with nearly presorted data.
The distinction is not often understood and has more of an impact that the observer might think. For instance, when writing an application for a handheld in which data is kept sorted and is usually viewed between insertions it makes sense to sort after every data element added to the database. However, this means adding a single item to a mostly-ordered set. Understanding that quicksort is a poor choice for this application means a difference in battery life.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
And they have infix notation...
S-expressions are in prefix notation. Infix describes expressions such as "1+2". Lots of parenthesis is hard to read, but twice that number of angle brackets is certainly not easier.
Blurring the line between data and code is a useful technique...
This only matters if you use the data in Lisp without being careful. Any non-interpreted language could use it just as safely as XML.
P.S. I don't even like Lisp, being a person who likes type checking before I actually execute a snippet of code. On the other hand, they really do have a point regarding S-expressions and XML.