Isn't that exactly what SELinux folks are trying to do. If they finish their policy based X server I think we might see a significant leap in desktop security. The basic idea is very simple: Applications should have access only to the data that belongs to them and only some "special" apps have access to other. FC2 with selinux on was a disaster for desktop mode though but as a server It's a really good idea. It's like chrooting all of Your services;)
"XML is not meant to be read by humans, it's a data interchange format and thus meant to be read by machines" - Good heavens! Someone saying something like that has really got a BS in BS! Or perhaps even worse: a PhD in BS. XML is all about programmers being able to understand the data! Yes, because we are not anywhere near that nirvana of fully semantic systems that can (semi)automatically understand each other. NO! Programmers have to do the work to make the systems fit together and XML gives them the advantage that they do not have to reverse engineer another proprietary data format or dig into a horsepile of documentation. XML makes it easy to understand how to process the information at hand - without any extra work! Also it's great format for storing small amounts of constantly changing data (like user preferences) cause it's extensible and with only a tiny bit of effort backward compatible as well. Anyone trying to use XML for processing large amount of data (like data warehousing) is either nuts or doesn't give a damn about the speed or costs. However anybody using XML for long term data storage is a genius since other "more efficent" formats will be obsolete ten years from now and the software that can read it can be extreamly difficult to obtain (anybody who has tried to decode data from some long gone accounting package from the '80-s knows what I am talking about). So yes XML is self describing only to humans and that's the whole point of it. Formalizing data semantics is not the goal of XML, has never been and will never be, thats what we have RDF, RDFS, OWL and other nice initiatives from Semantic Web movement for.
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Isn't that exactly what SELinux folks are trying to do. If they finish their policy based X server I think we might see a significant leap in desktop security. The basic idea is very simple: Applications should have access only to the data that belongs to them and only some "special" apps have access to other. ;)
FC2 with selinux on was a disaster for desktop mode though but as a server It's a really good idea. It's like chrooting all of Your services
"XML is not meant to be read by humans, it's a data interchange format and thus meant to be read by machines" - Good heavens!
Someone saying something like that has really got a BS in BS! Or perhaps even worse: a PhD in BS.
XML is all about programmers being able to understand the data! Yes, because we are not anywhere near that nirvana of fully semantic systems that can (semi)automatically understand each other. NO! Programmers have to do the work to make the systems fit together and XML gives them the advantage that they do not have to reverse engineer another proprietary data format or dig into a horsepile of documentation. XML makes it easy to understand how to process the information at hand - without any extra work!
Also it's great format for storing small amounts of constantly changing data (like user preferences) cause it's extensible and with only a tiny bit of effort backward compatible as well.
Anyone trying to use XML for processing large amount of data (like data warehousing) is either nuts or doesn't give a damn about the speed or costs.
However anybody using XML for long term data storage is a genius since other "more efficent" formats will be obsolete ten years from now and the software that can read it can be extreamly difficult to obtain (anybody who has tried to decode data from some long gone accounting package from the '80-s knows what I am talking about).
So yes XML is self describing only to humans and that's the whole point of it. Formalizing data semantics is not the goal of XML, has never been and will never be, thats what we have RDF, RDFS, OWL and other nice initiatives from Semantic Web movement for.