From: TB

To: Editor

Date: 16 Jul 2004

 

When I first stumbled across your writings, I could scarcely believe what you were saying about XML and the industry claims made about it, not really being familiar with the technology at the time. Well, as I become more familiar with it, I see your observations born out. Here’s an excerpt from the documentation for XMLSpy that is simply outrageous:

 

XML is object-oriented 

While the relational data model is very successful for processing large amounts of table-like data, manipulation of other kinds of data - such as hypertext (i.e. text plus hyperlinks), multimedia, graphics, mathematical or chemical formulas, hierarchical information - are not so straightforward. 

In contrast, XML is object-oriented in the sense of being suitable for describing objects of the real world or any abstract problem domain by modeling their properties as they are, instead of enforcing a normalized decomposition into various tables linked by relations. This makes XML documents more intuitively understandable and thereby reduces both the time required to design and implement computing systems based on XML. 

 

Yeah, too bad it doesn’t reduce the time required to troubleshoot and maintain them when they suck.

 

Keep fighting the good fight.

 

 

From: Fabian Pascal

To: TB

 

Sadly, not outrageous to a majority of practitioners who DK data fundamentals and, worse, insist on not bothering with them.

If it is to be fought, the fight need to be concretely supported by those who deem it valuable, [many of whom pay only lip service to it].

 

 

Posted 09/14/04