[geeks] Sneaking around keyword itis

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 08:16:49PM -0600, Jonathan C Patschke wrote:

> For $deity only knows what reason.  XML is, for all practical purposes, 
> wordy Scheme with potentially significant whitespace.  It's great for 
> storing irregularly structured data, but I still don't see how/why it's 
> going to be the saving grace of IT/CS.

XML seems rather handy for XML data interchange.  But only because it
managed to get such tremendous mindshare that there are dirt simple
parsers for use on every platform from every language (well, perhaps
AlphaBASIC doesn't have XML support yet).  Actually storing data in XML
doesn't seem so smart.  But then again, there is the whole coupling with
XSLT that makes even XML as storage for small or un uniform data
appealing, or XML as program output that XSLT transforms to either PDF
or HTML depending on what the client wants.

It isn't anything new.  Transformational systems have been a scheme and
lisp staple for a long time is my impression.  However, it is nice
seeing some of these ideas taken to the masses.
 
-- 
Joshua D. Boyd