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Celebrate the XML Decade

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the happy-birthday dept.

IdaAshley writes "IBM Systems Journal recently published an issue dedicated to XML's 10th anniversary. Take a look at XML application techniques, and general discussion of the technical, economic and even cultural effects of XML. Learn why XML has been successful, and what it would take for XML to continue its success."

5 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Why XML was successful by Ant+P. · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Marketing to PHBs, mostly.

    However here on earth a lot of people still hand-code the stuff. IMO a C-like syntax using nested {}s would've been better.

    1. Re:Why XML was successful by porkThreeWays · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sorta... XML came at a time when there weren't a whole lot of good viable data representation standards. Those that did (i.e. SGML) were too complicated for light use. XML was meant to be used by the masses while still technically remain an SGML subset. We have better alternatives today, but once something is in widespread use, it's not going away for awhile.

      --
      If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
    2. Re:Why XML was successful by smallpaul · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A curly brace syntax would have been a better format for "large scale enterprise publishing"? As someone who has spent more than a decade in that field, I must disagree strongly. A curly brace would have been better to allow enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. Please do not confuse what XML is used for with what it was designed for. There is a reason that XML delivery units are called "documents" and not "messages".

  2. Re:JSON itself is still quite bloated. by Duhavid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not all XML is readable by humans.

    The formatting strings in Janus controls come to mind.

    I have heard that the new Office format (XML) was pretty unreadable.

    And what is with modding everything in this thread to zero.

    --
    emt 377 emt 4
  3. Re:Celebrate the XML Decade by Dahamma · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Someone put that in our Bugzilla quips a while back - it's still one of my favorites!

    My conspiracy theory is that XML was secretly invented by Intel in order to require 3GHz processors for the simplest of tasks.