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Udell on "The Social Life of XML"

Jon Udell: The Social Life of XML

I get sick to my stomach when Udell gushes over XML like this, as he does often. Yeah, XML is useful, sure. But I have a fundamental disagreement with how he looks at it. Maybe I'll say more after I finish reading it.

Anyway, my view on XML is largely that it's plumbing -- it's nothing important in and of itself. And it certainly isn't a database.

Update (Jan 6): I just wanted to moderate my above statement a bit I didn't mean to be so harsh on Jon. (Data-oriented, as opposed to document-oriented) XML is useful because it gives a shared, human readable syntax for data, but it's overly cumbersome for that purpose, and its data model is pretty heinous. For documents (things that require mixed-content) XML is just dandy. But for data, XML is far from ideal, overly complex, and usually far too verbose as well.

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18:13 (utc-5)
edited: 2004-01-06 02:45 (utc-5)