Mark Wonsil writes:
> BrianT wrote:
>
> >HP made the first mention of XML on the the 3000 at this week's Software
> >Symposium.
>
> After reading this article, if you're left with the sense of "Big Deal" -
> good. That's the point. In the article, Alvina Nishimoto said there is a
> lot of noise about XML and she's right.
I read through a relatively quick intro to XML last night, and it
seemed to make sense. It's a bit dated, though; perhaps Mark can
comment on whether that makes any difference. I like the articles
because (1) they're a quick read, and (2) they show easily-grasped
examples.
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/41/index1a.html
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/45/index3a.html
Incidentally, there's an interesting quote from an even older article
at the same site:
According to Tim Bray, one of the editors of the XML specification
and member of the XML working group,
"XML is just a framework, the rest is all marketing."
The part that bothers me a bit about XML is that it's English-centric.
That's not "as big" a deal (IMHO) in HTML, because the English-centric
tags have meaning only for the browser software; <head> may well have
been coded as <abc> -- it's just something that would have to be
memorized.
The whole idea (as I understand it) behind XML, though, is that the
*user* creates the tags and attributes because they have meaning for
said user!
(To clarify, in the HTML expression <img src="foo.jpg">,
'img' is the tag, and 'src' is an attribute.)
That is, if I point to an HTML page in England, it may have an
attribute that says 'color="red"' because that's the only spelling
of 'color' that HTML understands. But if it's an XML doc, then it
is quite conceivable that the page could contain 'colour="red"'.
But in the XML case, the goal is to exchange "knowledge" rather
than just "data," so this must be handled "somehow." Sure, perhaps
the XML browser can be made to understand that "color" and "colour"
are the same, but that's just another variation on English.
What if the browser must be *global*, to support Spanish, Italian,
German, French, Greek, and (gasp) "two-byte" languages like Korean,
Chinese, and Japanese? Then, even if the XML uses Unicode (does it?),
coding a lookup table for this must be unwieldy.
Or am I making a big deal out of nothing?
--Glenn
|
