XML: A outside perspective

[David Megginson]

Sebastian Rahtz writes:

 > This contribution is by far the finest, I thought:
 > 
 >    Finally, in conclusion, as an American, I am saddened that the
 >    Internet seems to have been commandeered by a European based
 >    protocol. Was America so short of talent we had to buy
 >    the HTML protocol from Tom Berners-Lee at CERN ? 
 >    
 >    Think of the security implications of the worlds strongest economy,
 >    running an e-commerce protocol developed by a foreigner from Socialist
 >    Europe. Remember the wall has not been down for that long. Who knows
 >    what kind of trojans might be lurking within the depths of
 >    these complicated protocols.
 > 
 > There is just a tiny worry in my mind that maybe, just maybe, the
 > author was being serious.

It's Slashdot -- the author probably was being serious.  The author
was probably also 15 or 16 and perfectly capable of breaking the
encryption on DVDs in under 36 hours, so beware.

Nevertheless, there were many good points about the costs and benefits 
of using XML elsewhere in the thread.  

For example, one of the free software projects I contribute to is
FlightGear (http://www.flightgear.org/), the open source flight
simulator.  Eventually, they may choose to use XML-based configuration
and save formats, but even with an XML parser, that's a lot of hassle
when they can parse line- and field-oriented files within only a few
lines of code (and they don't have to bundle a parser library either).


All the best,


David

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

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