On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 12:13:35PM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:
On Thursday 18 October 2007 11:16:02 Safe Hammad wrote:
It has always amazed me that, considering the prevalence of XML, open source 'industrial quality' XML editors are scarce. I came across one recently at http://xml-copy-editor.sourceforge.net/. I've not had the opportunity to give it a good test drive, but so far it looks promising ...
It would be interesting to find out just how prevalent XML really is. Where is XML really being applied? I always get the impression (though I have no evidence to back this up) that XML has become an industry buzz-word and is discussed with enthusiasm by managers but with skepticism bordering on disdain[1] by IT professionals. The availability of XML tools could (given my clear bias for attempting to strengthen my argument) reflect this dichotomy: Assuming a preference amongst management for commercial (therefore accountable) tools and IT professionals (particularly the more geeky ones) for open source tools, notice how its Microsoft[2] and Oracle[3] who are pushing the most up-to-date XML technologies such as XQuery while open source tools (with the exception of Saxon[4] which, lets face it, is written in Java) and eXist[5] (again, written in Satan's language and not aimed at the business market) are currently sticking to the earlier standards (e.g. libxml, PostgreSQL[6], Xalan/Xerces). (Also note, however, Qt's recent addition[7] of XQuery to its framework. Where does this sit?) Is this because the open source community simply doesn't care about XSLT 2 and XQuery? Certainly Torvalds' famous rant[8] would seem to back this position up. And notice how AJAX is now becoming AJAJ[9].
XML has its place, but I'm not sure its in business information systems.
Our systems where I work use XML for just about everything that's passed between systems. It's very heavily used here as our product runs on multiple platforms running different OS and much of its raison d'être is moving data about. We are Oracle based for our databases so that's also a factor I guess.
I agree somewhat with your sentiments about it though, it's very user unfriendly as a medium for outputting to logs for debugging etc.