From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200307182034.h6IKYW725496@augusta.math.psu.edu> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] don't shoot me In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 18 Jul 2003 13:34:21 MDT." From: Dan Cross Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 16:34:32 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: fc2854bc-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > "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.