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On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Darrell Fuhriman wrote:
>> This is why I hate, hate, hate the XML crowd - there isn't anything
>> wrong with XML as such, but the people who use it because sticking
>> XML onto something makes it oh, so much better...
>
> But, but... it's a standard!
I should say - I don't hate the XML standard. In itself it isn't a bad
idea, since it did remove a few complexities from SGML that made it
harder to parse reliably.[1]
I do hate the XML extensions, where you get 800 pages trying to stuff
lisp into XML, or implementing a transformation language, or adding
namespaces, because they are insanely over-complex by and large.
...I really hate the people who think that the magic XML tag inserted
into a thought-free file format makes it "machine parseable" or gives it
some obvious "semantic value" that other software can pick up.
>> This was, for what it is worth, the way their binary data files
>> around. They used XML attributes to hold bit-fields, the meaning of
>> which was known only to their software.
>>
>> I was ... horrified.
>
> As well you should be.
>
> But then, here's my question... Why in god's name would you care
> how elegant the XML structure iTunes uses is? It's not really
> meant to be parsed by humans, especially humans who don't work at
> Apple, and the computer couldn't care less. Even a programmer is
> going to use a higher-level API.
>
> I guess I just don't understand what the point of the rant
> is... XML may be human readable, but as near as I can tell it was
> never meant to be read by humans, except possibly the masochistic
> ones.
No. I just pine for the days of SGML, when the goal was to produce
markup that was useful for both humans and machines.
I also dislike the average of three bytes to the one in the original
format that most "XML adoptions" result in.
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] Because, of course, we can't spend a little extra CPU time on our
2.4GHz laptop parsing more human-readable formats, right?
--
A good engineer gets stale very fast if he doesn't keep his hands dirty.
-- Wernher von Braun
There's stuff above here
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