plain-old-xml-considered-harmful

2006-11-25T14:41:28Z

1164465007:

= plain old xml considered harmful =

(This article is a stub, feel free to expand upon it)

The plain old xml approach has already been tried by *numerous* others
since 1998 and has failed on the Web.

http://blog.davidjanes.com/:entry:davidjanes-2005-10-04-0000/

OTOH, [[semantic-xhtml|XHTML]] + [[semantic-class-names]] has seen widespread adoption among the
web authoring/design/IA/publishing community. Microformats is leveraging
the approach that is both working better and frankly dominating in practice
on the Web.

http://microformats.org/blog/2006/01/09/tim-bray-on-creating-xml-dialects/

See also [[namespaces-considered-harmful]].

XML elements are limited to only one "name" and thus only one meaning, whereas the
class attribute is a space separated set of names and can thus capture
multiple meanings, providing a much more flexible semantic structure for
authors, and greatly aiding in following DRY.

There are 1000s more web authors/developers that write/understand (X)HTML
+ semantic class names + CSS as compared to the number of folks that
write/understand either plain or namespaced XML.

It's the publishers that matter, not the programmers. To put it
another way, programmers can solve problems once and share open source.
Publishers have to keep solving markup/publishing problems for content and
design numerous times continuously, and have much less chance of being able
to share their solutions. That, plus the fact that there are many more web
designers than programmers, plus simple economics, means the best solution is
to optimize for ease of publishing, and let iterative open source solve the
programming problems.

XML also has disadvantages in that an XML processor is required to abort when it encounters an error, so a single unescaped ampersand can cause an XML document to be entirely unreadable. This is hardly appropriate for an end-user application, so many people ignore this requirement and break the spec, so they're not actually using XML. Furthermore, serving XML over HTTP is difficult; there are all kinds of complicated issues dealing with character encodings; start with RFC 3023.

== See Also ==

* [[namespaces-considered-harmful]]
* [[microformats-easier-than-xml]]
* [[semantic-xhtml]]
* [[semantic-class-names]]

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