Re: [9fans] don't shoot me

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

> "Why not XML?

Why not, indeed.  When Paul Lustgarten was at Avaya, he was giving a
talk on natural language processing.  He had developed his own
metalanguage and support scaffolding to describe conversations, and
knew one of the questions that would come up was, ``why didn't you use
XML'' (replace XML with VoxML, or whatever DTD du jour you want).  His
response was to start the talk off with a, ``why not XML?'' slide, on
which he gave some simple arithmetic problems he asked the audience to
solve.  One catch: the numbers in the problems were written with Roman
numerals.

But back to XML....  I've used XML quite a bit, and also waffled over
it for years.  On one hand, I think the idea of a language-based way to
describe data (and capture its meaning, i.e., this is a street and not
just a text item) is a good one, but on the other, XML implements it
horribly.  First and foremost, it inherits the God awful syntax of SGML
(the true swiss army markup language).  Second, it's been abused to
death.  As various folks have mentioned, it's been applied like deet in
New York City after a rainstorm:  sometimes useful, most often
unnecessary and malodorous.  I think SEXP's are a nice alternative
(even if they are lisp), but unfortunately, no one uses them (I did
write a parser for them once, though).  Then again, no one uses Plan 9
but that doesn't stop me.  Third and finally, like Linux, it has a
small army of rabid prostelytizers following and promoting it who are
convinced it's the cure to world hunger.  The stench of their bible
thumping has tainted it and we've ended up with some real monstrosities
(like namespaces; ew).

	- Dan C.