Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

X is for XML

I once worked on a project where the end result of my efforts was to be data written in XML format. For those unfamiliar with it, XML is a way to store data along with a description of what that data is. If you are at all familiar with HTML, XML looks very similar, with beginning and ending tags that both delineate and identify the data. My conclusion by the time that project was cancelled, was that XML was stupid.

Stupid in the context of Cobol, anyway. Cobol, you see, requires data to be defined in advance. This enforces the idea of designing the program around the data, rather than the other way 'round. XML isn't like that. XML allows for fields to be included -- or not -- as needed, in any order, of varying lengths.

Cobol can handle that sort of thing, but it's a ton of work for very little reward, especially when both sides of the communication are being written together. For the project we were working on, it was insane. What we ended up with was a fixed length, fixed format record, with XML tags tossed in for extra overhead.

I have, however, encountered a context in which XML makes a lot of sense. In Perl, XML can be parsed using regular expressions. I have been working with them a fair bit as of late, and am sold on their power and utility. With these at your disposal, and especially when communicating with applications written by someone else.

So, like anything, in some situations, XML is an incredibly stupid idea and yet, it can be very useful, in the right context.