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This is wrong in almost every detail, and superficial where not wrong. But the underlying point, that we get useful things out of hype cycles even if they’re es

This is wrong in almost every detail, and superficial where not wrong. But the underlying point, that we get useful things out of hype cycles even if they’re essentially side-effects is true. I feel like there’s more skepticism about blockchain than there was about XML, so maybe it won’t have the same sorts of impact. On the other hand, maybe there’ll be a blogger writing pseudo-history in 15 years arguing that we got Git’s versioning system because of blockchain, so that’s nice.

purerandomness 8y ago
Can you name one or two details that you think were wrong?
- dnomad 8y ago
  The problem is that author lives in his own naive little worlds and lacks any kind of imagination to understand what life might be like on other worlds. I mean, really, you've got to be special kind of clueless to think the problem XML solves is syntax. Oh yes, it was all about avoiding having to write more parsers. Except that makes zero sense because each XML vocabulary does require writing custom code to process it or transform it and that custom code is just another high-level parser. The key problem that XML solves, BTW, is namespaces. It is a mark-up language, after all, that lets people assign unique names to data in a document. Anybody who actually works on systems that involve multiple enterprises grasps this quite quickly. (Unfortunately we don't all do Web CRUD.) As for blockchains the author is similarly misguided. Blockchains do not solve centralization. Systems like Bitcoin are centralization engines, they strongly incentive centralization at virtually every level, on a planetary scale. The blockchain platforms that show the most promise in real-world use are actually permissioned blockchains that introduce a central authority in order to prevent the race-to-the-bottom centralization incentives of Bitcoin and Eth. Ironically, the author is correct that blockchains and XML are linked. Permissioned blockchains like eg Corda [1] work so well because they lower transaction costs across business. Blockchains at this level solve the biggest problem there is in business, the Auditing Problem (sometimes called the "Trust Problem" but this is a bad name because the problem is that businesses can't and never will trust other businesses). I could go on but this sort of reddit-style ranting about technologies that the author clearly doesn't understand isn't valuable or productive. There are interesting problems and costs that XML and blockchains introduce but you're not going to find that here. This is just a dead end. [1] https://www.corda.net/ https://www.corda.net/
- hcayless 8y ago
  Sure. XML is not in any way an evolution of HTML. XML DTDs are there because one of the original requirements was backwards compatibility with SGML. You can’t (well, really shouldn’t) parse an XML document without the DTD if it has one, because, thanks to entities, parts of the document might be in the DTD. There wasn’t just one standards committee behind the whole W3C XML activity, there were many. Some of them did indeed go out of control, but it’s not fair to label them all that way. JSON hasn’t, and won’t kill XML. it’s a simpler solution for most of the things XML ended up being used for, but it’s pretty bad outside its comfort zone. Companies that use it aren’t necessarily dinosaurs. All that said, the author isn’t totally off base, just enough to annoy me on a Saturday morning :-).

purerandomness 8y ago

Can you name one or two details that you think were wrong?

dnomad 8y ago
The problem is that author lives in his own naive little worlds and lacks any kind of imagination to understand what life might be like on other worlds. I mean, really, you've got to be special kind of clueless to think the problem XML solves is syntax. Oh yes, it was all about avoiding having to write more parsers. Except that makes zero sense because each XML vocabulary does require writing custom code to process it or transform it and that custom code is just another high-level parser. The key problem that XML solves, BTW, is namespaces. It is a mark-up language, after all, that lets people assign unique names to data in a document. Anybody who actually works on systems that involve multiple enterprises grasps this quite quickly. (Unfortunately we don't all do Web CRUD.) As for blockchains the author is similarly misguided. Blockchains do not solve centralization. Systems like Bitcoin are centralization engines, they strongly incentive centralization at virtually every level, on a planetary scale. The blockchain platforms that show the most promise in real-world use are actually permissioned blockchains that introduce a central authority in order to prevent the race-to-the-bottom centralization incentives of Bitcoin and Eth. Ironically, the author is correct that blockchains and XML are linked. Permissioned blockchains like eg Corda [1] work so well because they lower transaction costs across business. Blockchains at this level solve the biggest problem there is in business, the Auditing Problem (sometimes called the "Trust Problem" but this is a bad name because the problem is that businesses can't and never will trust other businesses). I could go on but this sort of reddit-style ranting about technologies that the author clearly doesn't understand isn't valuable or productive. There are interesting problems and costs that XML and blockchains introduce but you're not going to find that here. This is just a dead end. [1] https://www.corda.net/ https://www.corda.net/
hcayless 8y ago
Sure. XML is not in any way an evolution of HTML. XML DTDs are there because one of the original requirements was backwards compatibility with SGML. You can’t (well, really shouldn’t) parse an XML document without the DTD if it has one, because, thanks to entities, parts of the document might be in the DTD. There wasn’t just one standards committee behind the whole W3C XML activity, there were many. Some of them did indeed go out of control, but it’s not fair to label them all that way. JSON hasn’t, and won’t kill XML. it’s a simpler solution for most of the things XML ended up being used for, but it’s pretty bad outside its comfort zone. Companies that use it aren’t necessarily dinosaurs. All that said, the author isn’t totally off base, just enough to annoy me on a Saturday morning :-).