XML class warfare, by Uche Ogbuji:
It seems there is no escaping class warfare. XML is a young society, but it is already succumbing to age-old divisions.
Some of the most successful XML vocabularies, such as XHTML, SVG and RSS, do not have much to do with data types -- they just deal in plain text.
Even among those who wish to use XML in conjunction with traditional programming systems, some prefer to minimize the coupling between the data in XML and the associated programming language values. This means that when they write ''1.0'' to the XML document, it's just a string as far as they're concerned, and only a few very specialized portions of the processing need to be concerned that the string can be interpreted as a floating point number.
These users make up the faction of XML bohemians. They are more concerned with the text content of XML data than they are with any class or type that might be associated. I count myself firmly among the bohemians.
Me too. That's why that secret markup language that we've been working on but haven't gotten around to finishing has no type information built in. Indeed, it's easy to add on type information afterwards if you want it, so it's easy to separate your data from the types of the data, depending on your needs.
Lots of discussion ensued.
Sunday, March 2, 2003
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