The Null Device

XML considered harmful

Via Richard's blog, a USENET rant on why XML is evil. It meanders a bit, in the classic crackpot sense (the extension of the metaphor of XML as a bad child into a reference to diaper fetishism, segueing into a digression on why Americans like big breasts, is but one example), but I must say I agree somewhat with the sentiment; to whit, XML is useful as a markup language for text, but putting everything in XML (as some are advocating) is just silly. For one, for most things, there is too much syntactic overhead compared with other formats, and the idea seems to suffer from the Microsoft Fallacy (i.e., the assumption that clock cycles are too cheap to care about and may be squandered at will).

(I was thinking recently of the data format for a project I've been working on (more info on that later), and was toying with making it XML-based; after all, everybody else is doing it, aren't they? Though I'll probably make it some sort of Python-like pseudocode notation, or something otherwise lighter.)

There are 1 comments on "XML considered harmful":

Posted by: Graham
http://grudnuk.com
Fri Jan 3 00:12:21 2003

Hmm. But XML is just glorified SGML anyway.

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