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Celebrate the XML Decade
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."
I started this morning by talking to everyone in XML.
I hope the black eye my coworker gave me heals before my presentation to the CTO tomorrow morning
My work here is dung.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Great Cthulhu..."
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.
... and most "enterprisey" Java developers have never met a problem that couldn't be fixed with more XML.
This year I'll be sending out christmas cards in XML and then placing a large banner outside my house with the appropriate schema.
//recipient[@name='mum']
Then with every following year, I'll be sending a stylesheet card which they can apply to the original XML.
And if they need to locate their names on the card, they can use
Task Mangler
Strange that an article celebrating XML's anniversary would neglect to mention XML's creator. I wonder if the fact he works for a competitor has anything to do with it...
All we can celebrate is a decade of bloat. For hard drive manufacturers and bandwidth providers, this has been a great development. But for those of us who have to deal with systems that use XML, we often wish that they had chosen a far more compact representation.
S-expressions, of the sort used in Common Lisp and Scheme, would have been a good alternative. They're simple, use a minimal number of characters, and are very easy to parse. Hell, most Comp Sci grads have written at least once such parser during their education.
The worst use has perhaps been with AJAX. Had AJAX been based around data passed as sexprs rather than as XML, it would consume much less bandwidth, and could be handled far quicker on the server side. Unfortunately, a poor technical decision was made to use XML. And so we get to hear all about the performance problems people experience with AJAX systems.
Take a look at XML application techniques, and general discussion of the technical, economic and even cultural effects of XML.
Cultural Effects? This is a spec for structuring data, not a Picasso.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<content name="Shameless Self Promotion">
Good point, though there's a better way to edit binary files.
For example, I make a product called FileCarver which allows you to create a file format definition (in XML! heh), that describes the format of a binary file, and the program will automatically provide you with a GUI to edit it. Check it out at http:/fizzysoft.net/filecarver/
</content>
When does a broken link constitute "Informative"?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
This is slashdot. Nobody reads the links.
:(){
Wait... let me figure this one out...
MCMXC was 1990...
MDCCCLX was 1860...
I give up! Which decade was XML?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Really...
We all needed to leave the first post in this to the guy with
the sig
"XML is like violence, if it doenst fix the problem, you arent using enough"
Or words to that effect.
emt 377 emt 4
Can we forget the hype, can we forget the PHBs, can we forget all the nonsense?
XML has a purpose, combined with expat, it is a convenient, if inefficient, method by which programs can exchange data relatively easily.
I am not an XML fan, by any means, but if absolute efficiency is not important, XML provides a common format for data exchange.
So we're officially stuck with this crap forever.
Yay! Lets party!
XML is for data interchange, nothing else. Unfortunately, it's being used for everything but.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
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
What XML needs now is a standardized (even ad hoc) format for Binary XML. XML is such a verbose format...
<greeting type="friendly">Hello, fellow coworker type dude!</greeting>
<response type="violent">Have a black eye!</response>
</conversation>
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Apple replacing the perfectly fine, hand editable plist format with an XML version. ick.
vague semantics, confusing specifications, unwarranted complexity, standards proliferation, poor tools, and wildly inappropriate application. Not to mention rampant disregard for existing work in nearly every arena it entered. So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Eh, what do I know? Maybe it is that bad. =)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
XML and JSON are typically sent via servers that understand GZIP compression, which means they're only bloated at either end of the wire (the server and the client). Clients have enough memory to store even 100KB of XML (and that's a ridiculous scenario -- few Ajax apps send that much and people send much more HTML than they do XML and no one complains about that). So then it comes down to server resources, and whether 100KB or whatever is going to matter to a server. IMO the complaints seem to be unwarranted (by all means though if someones got a good scenario let hear it).
Al Gore declaims the same every anniversary of the Internet.
If you post it, they will read.
You know, I like Lisp S-expressions better too. They sure are easier to parse. But, to echo your argument, we have libraries for that, right?
Decades of experience have shown the benefits of human-readable (and writable) formats, for programmers and non-programmers alike. I'll focus on the non-programmers, because in the end they're the ones creating the documents that are the object of the whole exercise.
Non-programmers author XML all the time. They do it because hand-authoring offers flexibility and power beyond what their applications offer them. They do it because they don't have the applications, or they can't afford them. They do it because innovation comes first, the tools come after. They do it because they're hacking FOAF or RSS or a Creative Commons license onto their web site. They will increasingly do it because when the application is obsolete, the data isn't.
If Mr Quin is right (I don't know, I haven't seen the research), your proposal exchanges long-term access for document authors with a bit of up-front convenience for library developers. In my opinion, that's exactly the wrong trade-off to make.
A more accurate answer to your question would be:
lkajt;oq iuj4 tylkmeafngm/lahtoi[quypitjnqw;lkrgejq;lk
KFG
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.
Care to share the DTD and schema you used for that?
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
...would have been a more appropriate exert:
As they puzzled and wondered, the bushes at the end parted and XML walked into the light.
XML! Exclaimed C++. What are you doing here? You're not a programming language.
Tell that to the people who use me, said XML.
$ cat
cat:
Celebrate the XML Decade:
Bah, it's too late to tell us to celebrate during the decade of XML because that decade is now over!
Yeah, should have done that; celebrating.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
You are trolling, right? Your rant basically consists of few obvious misunderstandings or statements that are factually wrong.
Seems like a knee-jerk reaction from someone who doesn't understand what XML is and its intended purpose. Seeing the HTML remark was rather amusing though. Way to go to show your ignorance on the subject.
BTW: XML is not designed to or intended to be a SQL replacement. Only morons would think that, claim that or use it as such.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I took the liberty of revising the format a little, is this better?
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>o n"
<conversation
xmlns="http://slashdot.org/sarcasm/XML/conversati
xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<participants>
<participant>
<short-name>OP</short-name>
<full-name>Original poster</full-name>
</participant>
<participant>
<short-name>CW</short-name>
<full-name>Unwitting coworker</full-name>
</participant>
</participants>
<relationships>
<two-way-relationship name="coworker">
<person>OP</person>
<person>CW</person>
</two-way-relationship>
</relationships>
<greeting time="2006-11-17T10:12:10Z" speaker="OP" targets="CW">
<type>
<demeanour>friendly</demeanour>
</type>
<speech>
<text type="text/plain">
Hello, fellow coworker type dude!
</text>
</speech>
</greeting>
<response time="2006-11-17T10:12:34Z" speaker="CW" targets="OP">
<type>
<demeanour>angry</demeanour>
<context>
<divorce type="messy"/>
<custody-battle type="messy"/>
</context>
</type>
<speech>
<text type="application/xhtml+xml">
Have a <html:em>black eye</html:em>!
</text>
</speech>
<action>
<punch>
<recipient>OP</recipient>
<aim>eye</aim>
</punch>
</action>
</response>
</conversation>
I'm sort of disappointed that I only got to use two namespaces. Can't get indentation to work either, unfortunately.
XML has won a significant technical victory. It has managed to stand firm in the face of the relentless onslaught of doubling processor speeds and memory capacities, so that our word processors are just as slow and bloated as they were a decade ago. Outstanding! Yay for XML!
Ten years of XML ... and here I am relearning TeX.
L
The Slashdot effect is now largely psychological. The server, knowing it has been linked to by Slashdot, pre-emptively dies irrespective of the fact no one is actually reading it.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Great Cthulhu..."
That would be me, but I ripped it from some AC comment.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
You're his co-worker, aren't you? Glad to see you've calmed down a bit.
Stupid Cheap Guitars
Just as blogs are the personal homepages of the new millenium.
tone
It's still a great sig. I laughed like the dickens when
I first saw it, especially since I was working for a place
that seemed to apply that theory liberally. You just could
not read the code and know what would happen, it was all
driven by the XML fed into it.
emt 377 emt 4
menkhaura, I just have to say that I, too, love your signature! I've used it in several presentations to much critical acclaim.
Take a look at YAML. That looks programmer friendly.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
I see XML as a glorified CSV file. Instead of being a two-dimensional representation of a data structure, you can use an N-dimensional representation.
If that's all it was, I wouldn't mind. But it gets so much hype. Why?
Not all XML is readable by humans.
Of course not... <foo>[10 billion chars of base64 junk</foo> is still valid XML. The point is that XML can be, in particular without having to write complex debugging functions. For an XML under 8192 chars (usually enough anyway):
qDebug() doc.toString();
That's it, done I have a debug function. Now write me one for that binary format or SGML or whatnot. XML is "developer-readable" if not "human-readable" by people at large. That is the simple reason it's popular. I wouldn't dream of using it if high throughput was key, but even in many server systems it is irrelevant unless you're simply a message-passing system. If you do anything significant work on the data, it's usually far greater than any XML inefficencies.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
qDebug() doc.toString();
/* Previews are for whimps */
qDebug() << doc.toString();
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The formatting strings in the Janus controls are easily under 8192, and
are not base64 encoded garbage, but are not readable. It is just one
runon string. Like English without punctuation or spaces or new lines.
Anyway, my critisism was aimed at those who misuse XML, not at XML
itself. XML is an excellent way to represent data, and as a programmer,
I really appreciate what it brings to the table. It does not cure
cancer, or eliminate world hunger, and should be used when appropriate,
and in appropriate ways. I have seen it used, and it made some issues
fade away. I have seen it used and introduce issues.
emt 377 emt 4
The story about the space shuttle and the horse's ass you linked to? Urban legend.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
We must not be thinking of the same XML.
n/t
But seeing as someone else on this thread has already mentioned something else, you see the problem. XML wins because Worse Is Better. I hate it, but there's not much we can do about it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
XML is a nescessary evil. Even though it's slow and inefficent, it's a good system for quickly developing a parser for varied file types without having to design an editor.
Acedemicly-pure XML is just needless overkill, IMO.
No, I will not work for your startup
Here is a more accessible opinion about XML.
This is true, but any good tool can be misused.
Why, just the other day my skull was bashed in by
a perfectly good hammer.
emt 377 emt 4
I'm not his co-worker, but yeah, Friday is the reason I had the time to type all of that. Also I've been writing XML schema all week so I needed some release. :)
Nope not trolling in the least!
From the WC3...
"Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere."
Hmmm moving data...., I guess I am not far off the mark.
Lets see and there is this which goes on at length about whay its a cool way to, wait for it..... Move Data!
But wait, there's more! You guessed it ladies and gentlement, the WC3 goes to great pains to tell you that only XML is X-Platform and is an excellent way to store, manipulate and transmit data! I would site this as a major push for XML to do exactly what I said it was trying to do.
As to you, fucktard, I was moving data between systems, more then likely, while the best part of you was running down your momma's leg. So shut your fucking cakehole and READ up.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!