Do you hate XML?:<br>Sigfrid Lundberg's Stuff

Sigfrid<br>Lundberg´s<br>Stuff

Do you hate XML?<br>Sigfrid Lundberg's Stuff 2010-07-29

I've spent much of the last fifteen years working on problems related<br>to interoperability, portability and longevity of data, and in<br>particular metadata in a library context. During these years I've been<br>working a lot with XML.

Early on I evangelized about XML with the fervour of a taleban. I<br>suppose that I contributed to the four or five years of XML hype that<br>started at the turn of the century and culminated 2004 - 2005<br>(cf. Figure 1, and Edd Dumbill's How Do I Hate<br>Thee?). Since then I've become more moderate, but still embrace XML<br>as the preferred tool for the modeling of data.

Figure 1. The number of web pages appearing per year<br>containing the phrase hate XML . There is a<br>steep increase in occurrence a few year after the Applied XML<br>Developer's Conference 2004. After that it seems to level<br>off.

The data points represents hits pooled for two year periods<br>graphed against the first of January the second year in each<br>period.

Because of the way Google works, the date searches mostly<br>hits blog entries and other syndicated material, where publication<br>date and other metadata are known. The earliest occurrence is from<br>2001.

Once you have grasped a technology you cannot keep up strong<br>emotions, at least not positive ones. You see both the shortcomings and<br>the advantages. Possibly you can become more negative as time goes<br>by. Or that is my personal experience. I think that our relations to our<br>technologies is a bit like human relations. There is an early period<br>when you fall in love. Then if you're lucky there is a long period of<br>friendship and love of another deeper kind that may last much<br>longer.

Already year 2000 a friend of mine described his relation to XML as<br>angle bracket fatigue, which I suppose is to be understood as<br>I hate typing XML, since its syntax is just terrible.

Figure 2. Search interest in Google for the term<br>hate XML . There are hardly any connection<br>between the change in occurrence of the hate XML-emotions and<br>search interest. People seem search for the term a few years after they<br>wrote about it.

Developers hate XML

Year 2004, sellsbrothers.com convened an<br>Applied<br>XML Developer's Conference. I cannot recollect that I heard of that<br>conference at the time, but there was one contribution which got quite<br>some attention around in the blogosphere. It was by Chris Anderson (AKA<br>SimpleGeek) who gave the<br>presentation Developers Hate XML. I haven't found the slides on<br>the net. However, Jeff Barr<br>summarizes as follows

Chris’s big beef with XML is that XML must be processed in<br>isolation, using special purpose tools and languages such as XSLT. In<br>order to use these special things, developers must become<br>domain experts [my emphasis] in a rich and complex<br>space that is essentially unrelated to the application itself.

I think Chris (and Jeff) points out something important here. Many<br>developers are interested in programming and computing, but not<br>necessarily application areas. To parse and make something meaningful<br>out of, say, bibliographical records or encoded text requires that you<br>are actually interested in those areas. The same is true for fluid<br>mechanics and natural language processing. Interest in partial<br>differential equations and linguistics, respectively, will help.

I cannot see any difference here between XML and SQL in this<br>respect. Any tools for object-relational modeling is subject to the same<br>problems. The developers that do the modeling has to become domain<br>experts. This is fairly obvious for XML and less so for SQL. While few<br>people form large scale standardization efforts for XML schemas, they<br>hardly do so for RDBMS Schemas.

What XML technologies provide that RDBMSs don't is an interoperable<br>transfer syntax. Which I suppose is the reason why most XML in the world<br>is stored in, well, RDBMSs.

On hatred

I cannot recall that I've ever written somewhere that I hate someone<br>or even something. I feel that hatred is emotional and irrational. It<br>may be a difference between languages and cultures, though; it can also<br>be a question of semantic inflation.

When we Scandinavians say that we hate something, we mean it. I'm<br>not sure that that's the case in the Anglo-American sphere, and I'm not<br>even certain that's the case for young Scandinavians. However, when<br>you're a middle-aged academic and intellectual, you may not think it's<br>appropriate to hate. Or, at least, you may not think that it's<br>appropriate to describe your dislikes and annoyances as hatred.

I have tried, a lot, to find out what people think about technologies<br>such as XML, SQL, noSQL etc. Here both love and hatred are used as code<br>words. People hate (or love) XML the same way they love (or hate) bebop,<br>pop or hip hop music. Not the way they love their children, wife or<br>mother.

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