"Andy Dingley" <> writes:
> Randy Yates wrote:
>
>> I was hoping someone here could answer this very basic question
>
> OK, so we have very clear trollsign on this one.
>
> However I like your domain name and you've posted to a TeX group in the
> past, so lets hope you're real.
>
> Reasons to use XML:
>
> * It's there
>
> * It's useful
>
> * It's international
>
> * It's synergistic
>
>
> The world is already full of XML. You have to use it (good or not),
> just because everything else you're connecting to is already doing it.
> "Why" is still up for debate, but "whether to bother" was forced
> several years ago. Just too late to not deal with it nowadays.
>
> It's useful. It actually works. Imagine that, a protocol that comes out
> of nowhere, does something useful, has a readable spec and actually
> works pretty well. There are a few corner cases where the alternative
> might be "better", but by and large XML is not only a possible
> solution, it's a damn good one that beats the competition on its own
> merits.
>
> It's international. These days The Hell Of Software Development (tm)
> isn't about dodging the bouncing feature request, it's about the sudden
> internationalisation request. Take a big, ugly (very ugly) English-only
> web app and have your sales team suddenly flog it to both Eastern
> Europe and an arabic-speaking country. Now deal with those character
> encoding issues in a plain text format (by yesterday). In XML though,
> you just pick a workable encoding, and the DOM does the rest of the
> hard work. Even for CJKV
>
> Best of all though it's synergistic. This is a great word, even though
> sadly mis-used by duck-squeezers and crystal-botherers. It's the idea
> that 2+2=5, or at least can give you the benefits of 5. The whole may
> be greater than the simple sum of parts.
>
> With XML, synergy means that if I use off-the-shelf tools to work to a
> standard protocol, and that if you use compatible tools to work to the
> same protocol, then our overall systems together will interwork well
> and be more capable than either one in isolation. To take an example
> from the TeX world, TeX is a great document format for typesetting, but
> it's poor for document management of large libraries. In XML though
> (such as DocBook) any generalised tools I've already built to look at
> "XML documents" and "extract and index embedded Dublin Core" will
> magically find themselves capable of working on my newly imported
> library, simply because we've all used XML and some decent good
> practice and other common standards. My hypothetical "XML indexing
> toolset" doesn't care too much if it's looking at RSS newsfeed entries,
> the British Library or contractual definitions.
>
> (Not that I'm at all biased against TeX, which there's a risk I might
> have to be working with soon for just this purpose)
>
> On the downside, XML doesn't do a damn thing on its own and always
> needs to have a "dialect" defined for it. This can be ad hoc and
> unspecified (i.e. the emergent dialect that's observable by looking at
> the data itself) or it can be formally specified and made rigid by DTD,
> XML Schema and OWL ontology (the ability to do the first casually is a
> big benefit over SGML). However you do always have such a dialect --
> whenever you hear snake oil talked about in the XML world, it's usually
> by someone who doesn't appreciate this and who thinks that synergistic
> benefits arise purely from using XML, not from sharing this dialect
> too. XML is _not_ an instant lingua franca for all data.
Thanks Andy. I can assure you I am for real. That's a real phone
number below and I really live in North Carolina in a town called
Fuquay-Varina. I really am an electrical engineer who's a member of
the IEEE. Really. I'm not one of those wispy internet "non-entities."
I'm also asking for the very practical and relevent reason that I may
have an opportunity to develop a large on-line, web-based system for
my client and am wondering if XML would be applicable.
Also, please everyone note, I'm not trying to offend anyone or make
anyone angry. I'm simply asking for information.
In a nutshell, here's my dilemma (and I think it may be related to the
"dialect" you were referring to): To interpret any stream of
data---for example, a document in plain TeX---you must know the rules
for interpreting the symbols. So even though XML may provide a
mechanism for automating the definition of data types, the rules for
interpretation of those data types must also in a likewise manner be
known.
That's as precisely and concisely as I can state it given my current
feeble understanding of XML. If you, Andy, or anyone can help me get
a better grasp or understanding of XML, I'd appreciate it.
--
% Randy Yates % "...the answer lies within your soul
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % 'cause no one knows which side
%%% 919-577-9882 % the coin will fall."
%%%% <> % 'Big Wheels', *Out of the Blue*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr
Similar Threads
