4 ms·

So one reason for XML failing is that people who nominally used XML didn’t fully use its capabilities to capture data structure and kept their habits from the d

So one reason for XML failing is that people who nominally used XML didn’t fully use its capabilities to capture data structure and kept their habits from the days of representing all data by fixed-width records?

hinkley 6y ago
XML and Java both come out of the same era. Java was supposed to be Object Oriented, but what we got instead is stringly typed code. Array literals in programming languages are pretty much as compact as you can get (start, end, one character element separator), and the type system or a little code often allows you to fix a 1:1 mistake after the fact. This attribute is now a number or an array of numbers. In XML if you want a properly formatted list you have to use child elements, which gets expensive really quickly so people balk. Especially if you already failed the attribute/child test by mistaking the value for 1:1 when it turned out to be 1:many. We also already have HTML class, style, and on* attributes as prior art that we use to convince ourselves that one more will be okay. Basically XML gets it from both ends. XML makes entity relationships and irreversible decision, in an era where UML existed and harped constantly on it. I don't know if there was any fixing it at that point. What I do know is that a lot of us shot meaningful glances at each other and tried as hard as we could to find something else to do until the dust settled. But you really could not avoid XML in the 00's.