Re: What problem is this task force trying to solve and why?

On 12/18/10 10:58 AM, "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:

>
>> It's clear to me that the draconian error handling rule is far and away
>> the biggest reason for XML's failure on the Web.
>
>Interesting, I wouldn't have expected that.

Probably because we have a very different customer base :-)  I suspect
that virtually all of yours care about XML per se to some extent.  The
vast majority of ours are only vaguely aware of it, and many of those who
do (e.g. most [?] software developers) hate it -- c.f.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=developers+hate+xml or
http://www.google.com/search?q=developers+hate+xml

>
>I would have said a much bigger factor in "XML's failure" (on the
>client) was that it's only been since about 2008 that there's been
>reasonably adequate support for XML processing across all the browsers,
>and by then the window of opportunity had passed by.

Sure, but I would posit that browsers didn't jump on the "XML on the Web"
bandwagon because relatively few paying customers asked for it, and the
support costs of dealing with all the "Page XYZ works fine in browsers A
and B but it breaks in yours!" complaints would overwhelm whatever
business value there was.  Gresham's Law / Worse is Better all over again.

> Javascript plus DOM, is
>hopelessly laborious for coding and very hard to debug. The attraction
>of JSON has nothing to do with its qualities as a data encoding, but is
>entirely due to it having a good fit with the programming environment.

Agree in principle but the "DOM sux" argument applies to HTML as well.
Clearly Dynamic HTML / AJAX / HTML5 Web Apps weren't crippled by the pain
of Javascript + DOM, so I'm not sure why that would have hurt XML on the
web worse than it hurt HTML.

Michael Champion

Received on Sunday, 19 December 2010 18:43:56 UTC