Other things I don't get (WAS: Re: A Joeish Erlang distribution (long))

[Roger]

I'm not alone, I'm not alone :-)

No I think you're right on the money. As part of a large company I've
been evaluating companies for their IP (intellectual property) as well
as their technology. Whenever we would get in the room with a bunch of
XML zealots I would ask them what problem XML solves. You'd be amazed at
the answers. I'll give you some:

- XML is human readable
I'll send you a couple of EDI XML documents (or Hipaa) and you may read
them. They're about a MB in size, and trust me, even though they have
tags, no human should or could read them
- XML garantuees interoperability
Not true, as the semantic meaning of any of the fields is totally
unspecified. If I send you an order with a delivery date, no one
specifies what that order date is (date of actual delivery, latest day
that this will be delivered by, best guess delvery etc. etc.)
- Half of the XML people don't even know why a dtd or xsd is kinda handy
to go with the XML doc :-)

There's lots more, but the bottom line on XML is IMNSHO that it is a
message syntax with good programming language support for parsing (i.e.
java classes) It could have been comma separated files, but by pure
chance that didn't happen..

-Roger





> Regarding parlay they have now started to publish xml/soap interfaces.
> xml/soap for traffical interfaces is even more bizarro.               
>                                                                       
> I asked a colleague the other day if he could explain one good thing  
> with xml and the funny thing is that he was totally confused about    
> this too.                                                             
>                                                                       
> If I think xml as such is totally overrated, I believe that soap is   
> pure stupidity.  Since this xml hysteria has been bugging for quite   
> some time now it would be interesting to hear others opinions.        
>                                                                       
> Am I way off here ???                                                 
> (I'm sorry if this all sounds like I have pms, but I truly believe    
> that traffical interfaces should have simple and efficient codings.)  
>                                                                       
> /Per                                                                  
>                                                                       
> 
>