[E-Lang] Concerning XML docs

[Chip Morningstar]

>From shap@eros-os.org  Tue Sep 18 17:09:14 2001
>
>Begin soapbox

soapbox or SOAPbox?  (sorry :-)

>
>At the risk of fanning various peoples' flames here, I have observed in the
>E group where XML is concerned a tendency toward well-motivated but ruthless
>purism, as expressed (for example) in the rejection of XML in favor of
>MinML. Some of the objections to XML are completely valid but not really
>important in practice. Some are simply silly. A few issues may actually
>matter, but I don't understand whether the truly impact us in practice.

I guess I'm not one of the purists in this case (despite the fact that I
usually do tend to be one such) as I am not familiar with MinML and what its
(or XML's) role in the E environment is supposed to be -- as I said, I think I
must have missed something that went by when I wasn't paying close enough
attention.

The last occasion I had to reject XML was when it was being considered for a
project I was involved with, and it turned out that the smallest available XML
parser we could find was by itself ten times the size of the rest of our
application, and this in a situation where one of the critical goals we were
trying to achieve was to minimize the size of an already-too-large user
download. This rejection may have been obsessive but it wasn't purist and it
wasn't ignoring the user base.

But my question was somewhat different. Regardless of whether or not I think
XML's supporters are on a fools' errand (you can tell, no doubt, that I do), I
think I understand what the general point of XML is. What I don't understand is
what its relationship to E is.

I would expect the reason (in general) for adopting XML would be to play nice
with others who have already bought into it, regardless of XML's goodness or
badness at doing the things it sets out to do.  In fact, I read this as the
basic thrust of your remarks -- play nice with others.

What I don't see is where the locus of data interchange is that these issues
become relevant to us.

Chip

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  Chip Morningstar                                                   FUDCo
  chip@fudco.com                          3339 Kipling, Palo Alto CA 94306
  http://www.fudco.com/chip                                   650-856-0119

	      "It's now safe to turn off your computer."
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