XML sucks at basketball

XML Fever

Reading the latest issue of CACM today, and really enjoying the new format and content. The article linked above got me to laugh out loud, and I can’t recall CACM ever doing that to me before.

It is certainly fair to say that XML is on average more self-describing than other text-based encoding languages, but that is like saying that the average dwarf is taller than the average baby; neither is tall enough to excel at basketball.

Apart from being funny, the article is actually a great “state of the art” overview of XML technologies in general.

Whereas tree trauma (discussed earlier) is a basic strain of XML fever caused by the various flavors of trees in XML technologies, tree tremors are a more serious condition afflicting victims trying to manage data in XML that is not inherently tree-structured. The most common causes are data models requiring nontree graph structures and document models needing overlapping structures.

Amen. Good stuff, worth a read.

XML Fever

Reading the latest issue of CACM today, and really enjoying the new format and content. The article linked above got me to laugh out loud, and I can’t recall CACM ever doing that to me before.

It is certainly fair to say that XML is on average more self-describing than other text-based encoding languages, but that is like saying that the average dwarf is taller than the average baby; neither is tall enough to excel at basketball.

Apart from being funny, the article is actually a great “state of the art” overview of XML technologies in general.

Whereas tree trauma (discussed earlier) is a basic strain of XML fever caused by the various flavors of trees in XML technologies, tree tremors are a more serious condition afflicting victims trying to manage data in XML that is not inherently tree-structured. The most common causes are data models requiring nontree graph structures and document models needing overlapping structures.

Amen. Good stuff, worth a read.