XML Exhausting Possibly Too Complex to Last
August 19, 2012
A post on DevXtra Editors’ Blog, “Is XML Too Big? Does Anyone Care?,” poses an interesting sentiment on the size and possibilities of XML.
XML, or the Extensible Markup Language, is too big and can be quite complex depending on the size and purpose of the documents. Syntactic analysis of XML documents are time consuming and difficult, not only for the people completing the task but also for the CPU. The World Wide Web Consortium says that XML “is a simple, very flexible text format.”
The blog post disagrees, stating:
“[…]it’s actually more difficult to parse a large document than to create one. If an XML document is damaged or malformed, software can become very confused, and often, even trivial errors or corruption in the XML document can stop processing. Working with schema extensions can be difficult, and older documents written using DTDs (Document Type Definitions) and Document Object Models (DOMs) can be incomprehensible.”
We think the better question is: “Will people care about XML in two years?” Currently, XML is crucial to exchange data and documents, but will the complexity of the system make it an inexpugnable solution? It is hard to validate using such extensive resources. A simplified system is surely, hopefully, on the way.
Andrea Hayden, August 19, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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