Friday, February 25, 2005
XML is overrated bullshit
There - I've said it. It's posted on the web, its public - cannot be retrieved and will be probably cached by numerous search engines only to come back and haunt me years later.
My shareware products will be using XML in the future, but I still stick with the overall comment that XML is overrated bullshit.
I've seen many fads come and go, some good, some bad, some fantastic and some plain silly. But the XML craze that began is odd because 'people were already doing it'.
It is essentially a structured text file - whoppee do! Smart windows developers and almost all Unix/Linux developers have been using text files for years. But now we slap a few HTML tags around the data and bingo - new industry springs up overnight, heralding a new age of interconnected computing.
"Why are going to use it, if its so overrated?" I hear you cry.
I already use text files for all configuration and data options in my applications, so its reasonably trivial to convert them to XML format. This is my main point - I believe (and others will back me up on this) that we should have been using text format all along, and my problem with XML isn't that its not a good idea (it is), its just that it was being done by thousands of others for years and it comes along as if it’s the new messiah.
By the way, XML is actually the reason I started a blog - just so the world knows that *someone* doesn't think the sun shines out of XML's bum.
Cheers.
Duncan
My shareware products will be using XML in the future, but I still stick with the overall comment that XML is overrated bullshit.
I've seen many fads come and go, some good, some bad, some fantastic and some plain silly. But the XML craze that began is odd because 'people were already doing it'.
It is essentially a structured text file - whoppee do! Smart windows developers and almost all Unix/Linux developers have been using text files for years. But now we slap a few HTML tags around the data and bingo - new industry springs up overnight, heralding a new age of interconnected computing.
"Why are going to use it, if its so overrated?" I hear you cry.
I already use text files for all configuration and data options in my applications, so its reasonably trivial to convert them to XML format. This is my main point - I believe (and others will back me up on this) that we should have been using text format all along, and my problem with XML isn't that its not a good idea (it is), its just that it was being done by thousands of others for years and it comes along as if it’s the new messiah.
By the way, XML is actually the reason I started a blog - just so the world knows that *someone* doesn't think the sun shines out of XML's bum.
Cheers.
Duncan
