XML

[Roman Suzi]

On Sun, 22 Jun 2003, Alan Kennedy wrote:

<skip plain text vs. other formats debate>

>4. Semantics vs. format: The OP was concerned with finding good use cases for
>XML, where it is a natural fit for the problem at hand. He seemed to be
>dissatisfied with XML both as a format, and as a method for building semantic
>object models. 

Well formulated, Alan! This is exactly what I tried to tell.

>My thinking is that it is the process of mapping format ->
>semantics that is the key issue: The easier that is, the more likely it is to be
>usable and to catch on. I think XML will continue to be grow in usage (not
>always used appropriately) because the format is trivial for people to
>understand (at a minimum requirements level), there is a common data model which
>most people can get their heads around, and the mapping from one to the other is
>easily dealt with through usage of the plethora of high-quality, standards
>compliant XML processing software that is out there.

I hope that after, say, 10 years there will be XML tools as stable as 
D.Knuth's TeX (he promised many dollars to those who find errors in his
code). By that date XML will be in much better position than today.
Of course, XML standards body need to be stable as well.

Plain text also suffered from format problems: we still have thousands
of encodings and 3 major variants of line-endings.

And, to remain on topic, I hope Python 3 will be ISO and/or ANSI standard ;-)

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
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