Coder’s Eye

I’ve long agreed with the point made over at ongoing about the XML Languages. Most are poorly considered ideas, entered into without understanding the enormous scope of the task. Most duplicate functionality rather than extending or utilizing something already existing and understood by millions of people and programs.

It is the famous Not Invented Here problem, I think. A programmer sees that some schema doesn’t appear to manage something that they consider absolutely important. So, rather than do any real research, they leap in and try to “do it better”. In most cases, they just won’t succeed.

Quoting the article:

The Big Five · Suppose you’ve got an application where a markup language would be handy, and you’re wisely resisting the temptation to build your own. What are you going to do, then?

The smartest thing to do would be to find a way to use one of the perfectly good markup languages that have been designed and debugged and have validators and authoring software and parsers and generators and all that other good stuff. Here’s a radical idea: don’t even think of making your own language until you’re sure that you can’t do the job using one of the Big Five: XHTML, DocBook, ODF, UBL, and Atom.

Wise advice.

link: No New XML Languages

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