Re: XML: The good, the bad, and the ugly

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote:
>> XML, it seems to me, is a format designed for general data transfer.
>
> It's a format designed to markup text with presentation, which
> is part of why it's so *bad* for general data transfer.

It's a recreation of Lisp s-expressions produced by people that got there by hacking on SGML who, as likely as not, didn't know they'd get s-exprs, and wound up with something less good...

It's NOT for "marking up text with presentation;" the creators certainly _did_ know that what they were doing was to create a way of structuring data that _wasn't_ about presentation.

>> It is a Jack of All Trades.
>
> Yes, it's bad at everything (except possibly marking up text with
> presentation.)

Yeah, I'd say it's good for that.

>> It is strong at providing data in a standard format readable by a
>> wide variety of different systems.
>
> It's no better at this than any other format. Just because many
> computers already have 500k XML parsers installed doesn't mean the
> format is easy to parse.

Just so. The APIs to connect to the existing parsers aren't particularly simple...

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