Richard Lewis wrote:
It would be interesting to find out just how prevalent XML really is. Where is XML really being applied?
I find it frequently, although rarely where it is "necessary" - usually a sign that the person who wrote the application thinks XML is great and used it. Howver it's infinitely better than proprietary formats, and I can't help thinking that the fact that an OpenOffice .odt file is basically an XML file, and its inserted objects (images etc) packed up in a .zip file.
What frustrates me is that understanding XML is easy at the basic level, but there seems to me to be a big jump between that and doing anything useful with it. Once you "get it" the world is probably your oyster.
The XML files which lead me to start this thread are from an indistrial software package, the previous version of which used a proprietary format. We've just completed a very large high profile job without difficulty because the XML file format allowed us to auto-create a huge amount of the application that would have been hand-coded otherwise. (I did all that without really needing to get to grips with XML and not touching XSLT etc, it was sufficient to just treat the XML as a big text file).
And notice how AJAX is now becoming AJAJ[9].
Yes, I'd noticed this too.