Great point. I think another example is XML. It was going to free us from proprietary, binary data formats by making everything nice and understandable pointy brackets. Everyone understands things written in pointy brackets, right?
The reality is that we got OOXML and ODF, which are so enormously complex that no piece of software except Microsoft Word and OpenOffice could hope to fully implement them. If there was an ACID3 test for either it would be fully clear how bad and non-interoperable the situation is. We got XHTML, which turned out to be a horrible idea ( http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime... ) and is now abandoned. We got XML schema, because everyone realized that when you have structured data you want data types, instead of everything being just text.
And because XML seduces you into thinking it's much simpler than it actually is, people write their own parsers and generators all the time that have no hope of knowing what to do with a CDATA section, and you get parsers that will fail if the whitespace isn't just exactly right. The whole thing is a giant farce.
Just like you say, people got excited about the promise of XML. This is the perennial problem when people try to create standards in an area that doesn't actually have any compelling implementations yet. Good standards refine and codify existing practice. Bad standards try to invent something and standardize it at the same time.
I would agree. XML is like OO, it's actually still useful in some cases, but if you don't have marked-up textual content you're probably doing it wrong. I wonder what fraction of XML in the world is actually marked-up textual content, rather than data masquerading as marked up text?
Comments
Great point. I think another example is XML. It was going to free us from proprietary, binary data formats by making everything nice and understandable pointy brackets. Everyone understands things written in pointy brackets, right?
The reality is that we got OOXML and ODF, which are so enormously complex that no piece of software except Microsoft Word and OpenOffice could hope to fully implement them. If there was an ACID3 test for either it would be fully clear how bad and non-interoperable the situation is. We got XHTML, which turned out to be a horrible idea ( http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime... ) and is now abandoned. We got XML schema, because everyone realized that when you have structured data you want data types, instead of everything being just text.
And because XML seduces you into thinking it's much simpler than it actually is, people write their own parsers and generators all the time that have no hope of knowing what to do with a CDATA section, and you get parsers that will fail if the whitespace isn't just exactly right. The whole thing is a giant farce.
Just like you say, people got excited about the promise of XML. This is the perennial problem when people try to create standards in an area that doesn't actually have any compelling implementations yet. Good standards refine and codify existing practice. Bad standards try to invent something and standardize it at the same time.
I would agree. XML is like OO, it's actually still useful in some cases, but if you don't have marked-up textual content you're probably doing it wrong. I wonder what fraction of XML in the world is actually marked-up textual content, rather than data masquerading as marked up text?