Re: Why Don't 'We' Talk about XML ???

[mlw]

Christopher Browne wrote:

> 
> Have you looked at the opaque set of standards?  I was a technical
> reviewer on a [horrid] book on Web Services Security, which actually
> amounted to a presentation of a bunch of "planned standards"
> surrounding XML 'security.'  XML is NOT 'Open Source;' it usually
> isn't even implemented correctly.
> 

I was at a Microsoft seminar last year, I thinks something like "toolshed,"
in Boston. I didn't want to go and as expected it was a complete and total
marketing scam. Anyway, one presenter showed how "secure" .NET was. He
added a password field to the XML message and showed how it wouldn't work
without the password. Amongst the "oos" and "aaahs" in the audience, me an
the guy next to me we laughing at "Is this what Microsoft calls
'security?'"

> And by the time IBM, Microsoft, and such get through with adding
> 'standards' to add the functionality that is missing, they'll have
> bloated things that are much more verbose, slow, bloated, and such
> than the things they tried to replace.

I just finished doing a contract writing a server, it had to take multiple
sources of XML input and, after manipulation, produce one XML output.

XML is horrific because it is conceptually no different that ASCII. Yea,
sure, ASCII is a standard text format, but it doesn't help you interpret
the text. XML, is a standard data format, but it doesn't help you interpret
the data. The fact that you can put virtually anything in XML means that it
is virtually impossible to create a program which uses "XML" for anything
other than a data format. You have to create a program that accepts a set
of records, with "these" names, with "this" hierarchy, formatted in XML.

My client kept getting new data sources, each formatted differently, but
each "valid" XML. I tried over and over to explain, "I need to know the
names of the records, the hierarchy of the data, and how to map the various
data entities." Their response? "What's wrong? It's all XML, shouldn't it
just work?" sheesh.

> 
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