Re: XML and its uses

Peter Flynn wrote:
Saving time, money, and effort isn't usually interesting when the cost of training for XML adoption is high, the software is mediocre, and when the nature of the information just doesn't require any of the benefits.

Saying the same thing another way: XML is just a tool, not a silver bullet. If it suits your current needs, great. If not, use something else until your needs change.

In my experience, many legal documents often wind up going into a system geared to handle ink-on-paper, and are generally manipulated as unstructured plaintext before that... and are recreated de novo each time (or from a template which is also plaintext and which must be re-edited each time). A word processor, or even a basic text editor, is a more than adequate tool for that environment.

If something is intended to be a _living_ document, with ongoing generations of editing applied to it, multiple renderings, and so on, portable semantic markup with separate styling becomes more useful, and a standards-based text-compiler environment such as an SGML- or XML-based system starts to gain the upper hand over the wordprocessors. Ditto as the data becomes more structured. Of the two, XML is succeeding better than SGML did because it hits the 90/10 point -- it delivers 90% of the strengths of SGML for 10% of the implementation complexity and cost.

But human-readable documents are becoming the least interesting application of XML -- even when you count the fact that the new version of HTML is XML-based rather than SGML-based. Which is another reason you're seeing slower uptake there than in the middleware data-exchange layers.

Summary: If you aren't interested, and your customers aren't interested, there's no magical reason you should care right now. At some point in the future that equation is likely to change; you have to decide when and how heavily you want to invest, based on whether you want to be on the leading or trailing edge of that wave and your own best guess about when it's going to hit your area.


Putting it yet another way: I don't think anyone's interested in getting into a flame war about it. Use the tools that fit your way of approaching your task to the satisfaction of your customers.

--
() ASCII Ribbon Campaign | Joe Kesselman
/\ Stamp out HTML e-mail! | System architexture and kinetic poetry
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