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Programming IT Technology

XML Turns 5 36

Posted by Hemos from the changing-times dept.
GiMP writes "According to the World Wide Web Consortium, XML turns 5 years old today. XML is used by many programs as a generic container for data. Applications range from websites, to word processor documents, to video games. It seems like only yesterday it was only a working-draft."
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XML Turns 5 More

XML Turns 5

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  • Horray for XML. Let's just home that it's embraced by more people as a universal data format and leads to greater openness in Computing!

  • Quite old.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rastachops ( 543268 )
    In computing terms 5 years is quite a long time. I wonder what replacements are in development, if any?

    • XXML (Score:5, Funny)

      by vbweenie ( 587927 ) <dominic.fox1@ntl ... .com minus berry> on Monday February 10, 2003 @07:55AM (#5269782) Homepage
      XXML - Extensible extensible markup language. Allows you to extend and redefine the EBNF productions which define the XML syntax. Roll your own roll-your-own markup language. Compatible parsers are few and far between, but an experimental application called YACC is rumoured to have some of the required capabilities.

      XXXML, or extensible extensible extensible markup language, is expected to undergo widespread early adoption by pr0n sites, as it permits a hitherto unimaginable flexibility in permutations and combinations of content...

    • Re:Quite old.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by ahy ( 536546 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:39AM (#5270296)
      <?xml version="1.0"?>
      <reply type="flame">
      <quote><text><sentence type="question" language="english"> I wonder what replacements are in development, if any?</sentence></text></quote>

      <text><sentence type="answer" language="english">Hopefully a more compact format.</sentence></text>
      </reply>

      • Especially when you have to entity-encode all of them for a Slashdot comment!

        Seriously, the point is to make it programmatically accessible/writeable and human-readable, not necessarily easy to hand-type. (Despite the fact that many apps using XML (Tomcat, Ant, others) tend to have hand-written XML files.)

      • Compact or SUV (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jefu ( 53450 )
        "Hopefully a more compact form."

        And here, all this time I thought bigger was better.

        In any case, this point always comes up. "XML is too verbose." But a certain amount of verbosity in programming is good (vis Python vs APL) though too much is bad (Cobol vs Java).

        So is XML too verbose?

        Given the right tools we could easily transform "<quote><text><sentence type="question" language="english">" reversably (thats important) to "<q><t><s t="q" l="e">" which certainly is less verbose. I'd be willing to bet that most XML DTDs/Schema would allow for most tags to be reduced to one or two alphabetic characters (that would be 700+ different elements). If thats too much you could build a simple tool defaulting the attributes, eliding the close "</...>" bits quoting unquoted attributes and so on. Which could give us "<q><t><s t=q>". Too verbose still? I could easily go a few steps further but won't.

        In any case, the challenge for those who find XML verbose is to find an isomorphic representation. That is a representation R and transformations XR taking XML to the other representation and RX going the other way so that XR(RX(text)) = text that is less verbose. Lots of people will thank you I expect.

  • Umm... (Score:1)

    by KDan ( 90353 )
    Happy birthday XML, then?

    Get any cool presents?

    Daniel

  • well then (Score:5, Funny)

    by LittleBigLui ( 304739 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:16AM (#5269856) Homepage Journal
    <song title="Happy Birthday" singTo="XML"/>

    • Re:well then (Score:3, Funny)

      by sporty ( 27564 )
      Non validated. We'll have to discard your entry if we just don't find it to conform. sorry.

      • Not to mention that a song should not be published on-line without some proper sort of DRM protection.

        The RIAA will not be happy about this.

        • Re:well then (Score:4, Funny)

          by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:24AM (#5270195)
          XML continues to simplify our lives!

          Just think, if we spoke XML, we could easy exchange data between people without speaking their language!

          • Re:well then (Score:3, Insightful)

            by KDan ( 90353 )
            Depends what you define as "data". You couldn't exchange stories with them without speaking their language (XML dialects (eg an XML dtd that is structured like a language to allow you to tell stories with only tags) count as a language too, of course. If you can't exchange stories with it, it's not much to fuss about - you're missing out on 99.9% of human knowledge and communication.

            Daniel
            • You're giving an "interesting" reply to a "funny" comment. This is not advised :-).

              The funniness of your parent comment lies in the fact that all these buzz-word "synergists" thing that XML is the cure all. And the comment is poking fun of that in an angry but correct sort of way.

  • xml turns 5... (Score:3, Funny)

    by mmport80 ( 588332 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:54AM (#5270033) Homepage
    ... and does anyone know for sure what it's good for yet ?!? :P

    • Re:xml turns 5... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by vbweenie ( 587927 ) <dominic.fox1@ntl ... .com minus berry> on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:33AM (#5270248) Homepage
      It will probably be another 5, or 50, years before we know to what extent XML was the answer to the problem of data obsolescence and the degradation of old formats (like "bit rot", this is a handy but misleading way of framing the problem, which is not that the formats themselves degrade but that the supporting software infrastructure fragments, evolves or falls into disuse. The question with XML is then whether XML-encoded data will prove recoverable and intelligible after SAX, DOM, SOAP and all the rest have fallen into obscurity).

      XML's self-description is one layer deep: data and metadata are packaged together. This layer can be seen as one layer of insulation against obsolescence: so long as the metadata remains meaningful, the meaning of the data can be ascertained and recovered. But the metadata is itself data, and if it too loses its meaning then it will be of no help at all.

      For any data at all to have a semantic value it must have a context, and contexts change over time. XML is meant to ease the translation of data between contexts, but it cannot preserve meaning for all time.

      • Re:xml turns 5... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by nehril ( 115874 )
        "bit rot" of supporting software is itself only a piece of the problem. even if we had XML decades ago, what good would it do you if you had perfectly formed XML data... sitting on your 8" floppy disk? IIRC google had to jump through hoops to get some older Usenet archives off magnetic tape, a feat that may not be possible at all in 5 years.

        • Re:xml turns 5... (Score:2, Interesting)

          by vbweenie ( 587927 )

          Quite so; a recent attempt at preserving old media is noted here [slashdot.org].

          With this in mind, may I direct the attention of budding geek archivists and antiquarians to Bruce Sterling's (and others') Dead Media Project [deadmedia.org], which seeks to document and analyse the conditions surrounding the life and death of media?

    • Sure, it's good for cooking you breakfast, walking your dog, and doing the laundry, but not much else.

  • Get Facts Straight. (Score:3, Funny)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:35AM (#5270265) Homepage Journal

    Well, even though "XML" doesn't obey proper grammatical rules, this Roman figures it to add up to one thousand forty.

    Plus, most people know that 1040 is associated with April 15 (at least in the USA)..

    • ummm...

      X = 10
      M = 1000
      L = 50.

      10 + 1000 + 50 = 1060

      That's not 1040... Maybe if you do a permutation, you'd have
      MXL or XLM both of which could add up to 1040... but X + M + L = 1060.

      Sorry, it just doesn't work.

      • Smaller numbers to the left of larger numbers are subtracted instead of summed.

        Good thing tax returns are in Arabic. The Romans would not have tolerated these kinds of arithmetic mistakes,

        Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.
        • Well, I guess it all depends on how you "add" up the numbers, eh?

          If you address each letter individually, or vaguely attempt to address it as a whole.

          Yet, if I say IIIV , it is not 2 in Roman numerals. It's just a really messed up number.

  • Still a toddler... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pmz ( 462998 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:37AM (#5270688) Homepage
    This article is just another reminder how young XML and its associated standards are. No wonder most people are confused about it.

    Whenever I look at the last ten to fifteen years of computing history, I am utterly amazed. Think about this: during the Gulf War, with all its high-tech-ness, the best PCs were 386s or low-end 486s, and the best Sun workstations were the lower-end SPARCstations (i.e., perhaps a 40MHz CPU, probably 30MHz).

    Whenever I see people who are totally overwhelmed by the almost unbounded number of buzzwords, platforms, and dozens of ways to accomplish the same task, I try to remember that nearly everything we take for granted today was popularized in the last decade (often just in the last five years, like XML). There is a quote in the Solaris Internals book that says there were 3000 UNIX systems in 1982 (or 83). There are several orders of magnitude more systems today. No other time in human history have we had to cope with this sort of change in so short a time.
  • ... there's still no easy way for XML to be used in C apps, frankly.

    Seems to me this would've been good from the beginning. Sure, we've got things like libexpat, etc. but there's no really easy way to say, convert your C-style structs directly to XML constructs for easy streaming...
    • This seems more like a problem in C than in XML.

      C really should have reflection, shouldn't it?

      In e.g. Ruby or Guile, this would be easy as pie.

      BTW, It's really hard to parse XML in i386 assembler, any hints? :)

      • Sorry, I was pretty obtuse.

        What I meant was, after 5 years there is still no easy way to just take your struct's from .h, pipe them through some tool, and get some sorta code generated that does the necessary streaming/'introspection' to get everything back into C-struct land with a few function calls and an open fd ...

        XML is great. I use it all the time in the other languages I use.

        But its just not so easy in C ... and we ought to keep that in mind with stuff like data and archive formats (which is what XML is a system for providing, fundamentally).

        These sort of specs can have that sort of effect on language, it seems ...

        I dunno how I didn't manage to say that in the original post, I guess I should've previewed.

  • SGML (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    and how old is XML's grandpa, SGML?

    the idea of structured text isn't THAT new!!
  • Although XML may be full of potential, I and many others have found that XML 1.0 has carried significant baggage from the SGML document-centric world, and XML is being shoe-horned into service for data representation. The fact that there is even such a problem as "elements-vs-attributes" when trying to represent a simple value indicates that all is not well. All the standards built on top of XML 1.0 inherit its limitations. The first generation of the Web was originally designed by one person and used HTML, HTTP, and URI. It was quite simple and people adopted them because things were understandable. 10+ years later and we need 12+ languages to write a simple application. The collection of half-baked standards are a house of cards waiting for a small breeze to knock it down.
  • I think it is a sad conclusion that XML is here to stay, as it is not such a good format for which is intended and attempts to fix some of the flaws of XML by additional (and often contradicting) formalisms, have not made things better. XML basically can only represent a tree data-structure with named nodes and attributes. It does not have facilities to represent sorted and unsorted collections with key fields in a proper manner. It also lacks a mechanism for representing references between elements and it is rather poor with respect to the explicit definition of semantical properties of the data, and is very limited in the expression of additional constraints. I once made an effort to come up with something better myself. Please read this description [planet.nl] for the details.
  • ...I hope that XML doesn't wake up with a middle-aged hooker and a hangover like I did on mine.

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