 Chainsaw syndromeWe see that XML is being used in a diverse range of applications. This creates a snowball effect with the development and availability of a range of supporting tools, so that using XML becomes a path of least resistence (technically, managerially, operationally and pedagogically) for creating and deploying new applications. As long as these XML tools represent a true "highest point of departure" for such developments this has to be a Good Thing, but in my experience such tools have a way of becoming more trouble than they save the further one moves away from their originally designed purpose. XML was an outgrowth of SGML, which itself was a framework for adding structural information (markup) to human readable documents. Hence the name, eXtensible Markup Language. As such, XML is admirably suited to encoding structure in a textual format. It is conceivable that many of the proposed uses for XML come about simply because it is there, and popular. I have heard smart engineers claim that XML should displace use of MIME in new Internet protocols. But encapsulation is one of the tasks for which XML is very poorly suited: to find the end of XML-encapsulated data, one must parse the entire content. (Other, non-MIME formats have been proposed to overcome these problems, but they are no more XML than MIME is.) Apparently, there's an old IETF saying "when the only tool you have is a chainsaw, everything starts to look like a tree" (I couldn't find an original citation, but [5] [6] are a couple of recent mentions). Maybe XML should be known as the "eXtensible Meme Language"? [5] http://www.imppwg.org/ml-archive/IMPP-WG/200005/msg00042.html [6] http://www.imppwg.org/ml-archive/IMPP-WG/200007/msg00086.html |
