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XML

Roman Suzi rnd at onego.ru
Fri Jun 20 14:24:54 EDT 2003 
I have a feeling that XML steadily moves out of buzz-word set into usual life.
But along with this I have a feeling that XML is not as useful as it was
presented during it's hype period. I myself have not found any use for it.  
There is always something more practical than XML.

The main area where I'd liked XML to be useful is Web content. I am supporting
(on a volunteer basis) some web projects and in my interests is to get raw
material put into static HTML in as little time and effort as possible.

It seems like good idea for XML - but alas my adhoc data formats are simpler
and less keystroke demanding.

I just wanted to hear opinion of Pythoneers about practicality of XML. I do
not question it's usefulness when interfacing with some XML-powered system.
But isn't it an overkill for simpler tasks? Or maybe I am missing some great
opportunity to do work faster and simpler?

Let me present an example. I want to maintain data about my employer's
agencies in our region and other information (like phone numbers, addresses,
etc) for a presentation on a web-site. It looks like a perfect fit for an XML
because the data is tree-like. Right now I am using several tables in RDBMS to
represent the data and it takes several selects and Python glue to make a
human-readable presentation of it. The main goal is to make any factual change
a one point change. However, there are only 2 views of the data so creating
XML-powered scripts for them seem to be overkill...

I am trying to find use of XML in my doings for 2 years already and every time
I find XML not appropriate for the task. XML is human readable but I think it
is still hard to edit XML files by hand. This is not the problem with
machine-generated/read data but other, adhoc formats (like plain Python) are
even less problem. What is the niche of XML? I do not believe it makes
interapplication communication more robast (I think it's of the same quality
as OOP helping code reuse). Dealing with XML requires more effort than dealing
with ASCII texts by grep or re.search().

I wonder if my pessimism toward XML is not unique. So I am writing here 
to find if anyone else shares my thoughts (and has courage to admit it).


Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
-- 
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