Sylvain Hellegouarch's comments always seem to require another full blog entry for further discussion (that's a good thing: he asks good questions). In response to "Why support template-like output in Amara?", he said:
Regarding the point of bringing developers who dislike XML into the X-technology world, I think it's useful but I hope you won't try too hard. Whatever tools you could bring to them and how hard you may try, if they have a bad feeling about XML & co., you won't be able to change their mind.
That's not really what I meant. I don't go for religious conversions. The issue is not that there are people out there who will never have anything to do with XML. That's fine. The issue is that some people hate XML but at the same time have no choice but to use XML. You hear a lot of comments such as "I hate that stupid XML, but my job requires me to use it". XML is everywhere (I certainly agree it's overused) and most developers cannot avoid XML even if they dislike it. The idea is to give them sound XML tools that feel right in Python, so that they don't shoot themselves in the foot with kludgery such as parsing with regex, or even the infamous:
print "<foo>", spam, "</foo>"
Aside: if anyone who has to deal with XML is not aware of all the myriad ways that the above will bite you in the arse, they should really read "Proper XML Output in Python". The idea is that tools like Amara don't all of a sudden make people like XML, but rather it makes XML safer and easier for people who hate it. Of course it also makes things easier for people who like it, like me.
I "categorise" people who don't like XML into three sections :
- Those who never tried and simply judge-before-you-taste.
- Those who tried XML but didn't use it for the right purpose. Some people only see XML as a language used by some dark J2SE application servers for their configuration file. They don't realise that XML is also a meta language that has brought some other fantastic tools to store, describe, transform, validate, query data.
- Those who simply react to the hype XML had had in the last 5 years. A bit like when you here during months that a movie you haven't seen at the cinema is fantastic and that you should really watch it. You get so tired of hearing it that you don't want to watch it.
Nice classification. I think the good and the bad of XML is that it has brought so many areas of interest together. As I say in this Intel developer journal article:
XML was a development of the document management community: a way to put all their hard-won architectures on the wide, enticing Web, but when it burst on to the scene, the headlines proclaimed a new king of general-purpose data formats. Programmers pounced on XML to replace their frequent and expensive invention of one-off data formats, and the specialized parsers that handled these formats. Web architects seized XML as a suitable way to define content so that presentation changes could be made cleanly and easily. Database management experts adopted XML as a way to exchange data sets between systems as part of integration tasks. Supply-chain and business interchange professionals embraced XML as an inexpensive and flexible way to encode electronic transactions. When so many disparate disciplines find themselves around the same table, something special is bound to happen.
XML itself is not very special. It represents some refinement, some insight, and many important tradeoffs, but precious little innovation. It has, however, become one of the most important new developments in information systems in part because of the fact that so many groups have come to work with XML, but also because it has focused people's attention to important new ways of thinking about application development.
The reason XML is overhyped is because we live in the age of hype. People don't know how to say "X is useful" any more. They're rather say "it's the gods' solution to every plague released by Pandora" or they say "It's the plaything of the guardians of every circle of Hell". XML is neither, of course. It's useful because it happens to be one data format that is respectable in a wide variety of applications. But like any compromise solution, it is bound to have some weaknesses in each specific area.