Article:		The XML Book Business
Subject:		XML should solve a problem
Date:		2003-10-30 01:38:49
From:		Rinie Kervel
Just my personal view. But books and articles often use a technology because it exists, not to solve realworld problems. Basic XML formats (e.g. XUL or config files) are clear, not very verbose and both easily understood by humans as by computers. XML schemas or regular expressions are hard to read for non programmers. SAX is hard to use and there is no intuitive way programs should read and write XML (as means of serialisation for instance). I feel that using XML 2 things should be separated: - Is the input valid XML for my Schema (should be checked automatically, not in my code) - Processing the XML data Furthermore: - Is serialization a dump of my programs object state or a human readable interface format between different applications, written in different languages. This becomes worse if you couple a relational database (SQL), a prgramming language (objects in Java,C#, Python or Perl) and a XML file: - Is the XML serialized SQl, serialize Java objects or an XML format that can be stored in Java objects or SQL tables. Also from a Windows perspective Java, Perl or Python are not mainstream tools (and I dislike the everything should be in Java approach). Just my thoughts

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• XML should solve a problem
  2003-10-30 01:39:52 Rinie Kervel [Reply]
  
  Forgot.
  Perhaps examining XML processing with Excel 2003 could be interesting?