Is XML becoming edi for wasters?

democrates

I've started to lose faith in one of the directions of XML.
It's a document-centric standard. That's fine for XHTML, SMIL, SVG and so on, where users are interacting with multimedia documents in their browsers. No problem with XML in the presentation layer.

But it's got serious limitations when it comes to data interchange.
It's horrendously verbose for starters, a bandwidth hog, but that's not the main problem.

It enforces a hierarchical structure regardless of the abstract nature of the data it transports, and now like the OOP community before it, it is laying siege to the database. XML zealots are complaining that RDBMS's must now do a gunther job and mutate sql to cope with the xml hierarchical paradigm.

Meanwhile some 'leading edge' applications are even dropping entire XML documents into CLOB fields! Say goodbye to useful queries, you've now got only one query, the xml hierarchy. We had hierarchical databases before, and they were royally trounced by the vastly superior relational model.

XML shouldn't even be let exert it's hierarchical self as the means for what is ultimately RDBMS to RDBMS communications. How backward is that. If W3C had any sense they'd drop the hierarchy, and make xml for database interchange reflect the relational models they travel between.

aidan_walsh

Meh, you're going to get zealots everywhere, and they'll try to shove it in everyones faces, appropriate or not. Just stick to the right tool for the right job, evaluate the pros and cons of everything before hand and avoid what doesn't give you the right results.

OfflerCrocGod

democrates wrote:

But it's got serious limitations when it comes to data interchange.
It's horrendously verbose for starters, a bandwidth hog, but that's not the main problem.

It enforces a hierarchical structure regardless of the abstract nature of the data it transports,

True. Another example is the new fad AJAX; using XML has some serious problems - I wonder why it's called AJAX tbh as it's not necessary or even the best solution. Google use JSON for all their data transfers with regards to Suggest, I'm not certain about Maps or Gmail but I think they are the same. XML is bloated and slow to parse and transport compared to something as lightweight as JSON. The other problem is that XMLing server objects could also force you to put information into your XML that is simply not necessary or that is already available client-side, it seems that anything with 'X' in it is automatically cool.

TempestSabre

Agreed.

I've seen XML misused so many places. Probably 8 out of 10 times I see it. Often it only adds layers of abstraction where its simply not needed. We're using XML forms at the moment in .NET and the question "why" always pops into your head when you are working on it.

That said I have seen it used well. As an interface between dissimilar systems and platforms, and also a client side cache for web apps.

Hobbes

There is a binary form of XML afair, also you tend to compress XML in data transfer. I guess the bloat is in memory?

There was a good article called "The Top 10 myths of XML" in Spectrum? (IEEE publication anyway). Don't have it handy but does point out the really stupid things some people do with XML and explains that XML isn't the holy grail.

rsynnott

I don't think any decent programmers are perpetrating the horrible one column XML-in-BLOB thing. Strictly the sort of people who shouldn't be allowed design databases anyway.