XML is Evil
[Via Sean Palmer] Ted Nelson explains why XML is evil.He concludes,?I don’t mind people using it as long as they don’t believe in it. We need to keep looking for neutral representation that can represent any structure whatever without warping or surplus meaning.?
Ted often suffers from ?Not Invented Here, Try My Stuff Instead? syndrome and sometimes makes judgements without really understanding what he’s talking about (for example, he claims that ?semantic web? is based on XML, which is not at all true, and he ignores that RDF data model is NOT hierarchical, and is in fact exactly intended to escape the hierarchy that he complains about).
But Ilove his rants, and agree with him 100% about ?use it without believing in it?. We need smart people providing counterpoints like this, to avoid becoming too religious about our technologies. We invented XML as a tool to serve us, not the other way ’round. For the same reason, I really liked PaulT’s erstwhile ?xmlsuck?, and in some ways I miss the rowdy anti-XML days of a few years ago.
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Completely off-topic, this new example of wacky redacting is just hilarious. In 1999, we released the file with no redactions, but now we have re-released it to remove all of the ?secrets?. The fact that Pinochet drank pisco sours is considered a ?secret? now. One imagines a drunken redactor working feverishly in the night. His eyes light up! ?Pisco sours!Must redact! Protect the bodily fluids!!?