XML *should* be boring

[David Megginson]

Simon St.Laurent writes:

 > If that's the case, we've all lost out, and should tell the
 > magazines to cool the hype and settle down to more important
 > stories on exciting issues like stock prices and IPOs.

I wish that we could have prevented the hype in the first place, but
that's all spilled milk now.  XML is a very important standard -- I
think that it is roughly to information exchange what TCP and IP are
to networking -- but it's still just a standard, not a product.

Normal people don't get excited about TCP/IP; instead, they get
excited about the applications that happen to use TCP/IP, and they
soon take it for granted that different applications can communicate
so easily under different circumstances (a noisy copper phone wire,
ethernet, fibre optic, wireless, ATM, all across different OS's and
architectures).

If we do our job as well as the TCP/IP people did, users should hardly
notice that XML exists -- after all, we're supposed to help them do
their work, not draw attention to our own.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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