Today I took some time to quickly scan through a backlog in my feed reader. There were a good number anti-XML articles cropping up. This got me thinking. What do you think of when I say “XML”? I personally associate XML as a baseline technology in a large set of tools used for describing data. For example, I think of Atom and XHTML within the scope of RESTful web services. Next up would be document formats such as DITA and DocBook. This starts me thinking about linking data and technologies such as XInclude and XPointer. As I reflect on where my mind wonders when thinking about XML, themes of linked data and document resources quickly rise to the top. What does not come to mind is WSDL, XML Schema, object serialization, configuration files, or SOAP.
What do you think of when I say XML? What kind of context does XML succeed and where does it fail?
I either think Web Service or AJAX (not Ajax)
context: talking to another service or GUI or DB
Like you, I think "baseline." I do lots of HTTP work and XML is the 'lingua franca' for all our apps. Data appears as XML, is transformed via XSL into target media types (XHTML, Atom, JSON, PDF, SVG, etc.). Most text inputs are converted into XML (FORM posts, JSON objects, etc.), are validated via XSD, and then processed (via XSL) into the final target.
My biggest challenge is finding good 'tooling' for XML-handling. With all the fancy compiler tools w/ code-completion and the like, working with XML tools can be a bit of a bummer. But that's tools - not XML.
well i'm new and i really don't understand all this rss feed stiff, but i guess the topic you are talking about can be helpful to some, and none to others, please don't think of me to be stupid, but i'm just learning how to post a bulletin, so why not say something truthful.
"Hammer". As in, when you have one, everything looks like a nail. XML was designed for documents but is used to varying success for objects and messages as well.
Sorry, but I had to say it: Bloat. Over-engineering. Enterprise frameworks.
Three words,
* Open
* Supported *everywhere*