Reading the latest issue of CACM today, and really enjoying the new format and content. The article linked above got me to laugh out loud, and I can’t recall CACM ever doing that to me before.
It is certainly fair to say that XML is on average more self-describing than other text-based encoding languages, but that is like saying that the average dwarf is taller than the average baby; neither is tall enough to excel at basketball.
Apart from being funny, the article is actually a great “state of the art” overview of XML technologies in general.
Whereas tree trauma (discussed earlier) is a basic strain of XML fever caused by the various flavors of trees in XML technologies, tree tremors are a more serious condition afflicting victims trying to manage data in XML that is not inherently tree-structured. The most common causes are data models requiring nontree graph structures and document models needing overlapping structures.
Amen. Good stuff, worth a read.
