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At 11:52 AM 4/17/98 -0400, Frank Manola wrote: >These observations about the (at least so far) lack of success with truly >interoperable APIs are certainly true, and the potential of interoperable >syntax "feels" right, but I wonder to what extent we may be comparing >apples and oranges here. Specifically, what do we mean by "interoperable"? >Interoperable APIs are hard at least in part because an incredible amount >of semantics are (implicitly) built into a typical API (as is suggested by >Matthew's comment). This nicely points out something that's been bothering me about all the fervor surrounding XML as a format for data representation. Having your data expressed in XML does not necessarily make it any less proprietary than having it in a nasty old binary file. I contend that the utility of XML diminishes as the complexity of the data model increases. Take for example an Excel spreadsheet. This is essentially the binary serialization of a complex data structure. Assume that magically this becomes an XML document, what now? You can't reason about this in any meaningful way without understanding the semantics of every element. Assuming the semantics are documented, you might be able to extract information from it (which makes it worth having), but it is doubtful that you can modify it reliably. In theory we're now "free" to implement our own spreadsheet editor on top of this "open" data model, but is that really going to happen? No, we'll continue to use the API provided by the vendor because its the implementation of the semantics that's the hard part. Certainly there is a lot that can and should be done with XML, but I'm not convinced its any universal data representation panacea. Jeff xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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