On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> XML is just an SGML restriction. I'm not sure I believe that just
> using XML would allow for magical appliation compatibility. In fact,
> I'm pretty sure it won't.
Not by itself, but with some planning, yes. The philosophy of
SGML is that data is king. In the commercial software world,
vendors lock consumers into standardizing on applications through
the use of proprietary data formats. This works because you
generally have a much bigger investment in your data than you do
in your software. If a vender gets you to store your data in
*their* format, they have you hooked as conversion among
proprietary formats is always expensive in effort, data/metadata
loss, or both.
Instead of standardizing on applications like this, SGML promotes
standardizing on data formats. This is a hard sell to commercial
vendors because it robs them of their customer "loayalty" by
making it easier for customers to switch applications without
incurring data conversion costs. The economics of open source
are a bit different though, which make me optimistic. [Footnote:
The early adopters of SGML really jumped on this. The aircraft
industry, for example, has to actively maintain documents for the
service life of an aircraft. That can easily be longer that most
software companies have even been in existance, so standardizing
on data rather than applications was critical.]
That said, for some applications, SGML is just a pain in the butt
as a native working format for data. The data associated with
GnuCash, for instance, is textbook relational database material
and it is probably best to treat it as such for internal storage
and manipulation.
HOWEVER, XML is excellent for data transfer between applications
or application modules and a lossles conversion to/from XML would
be extremely valuable but requires some careful thinking about
how best to package it. Think QIF only a whole lot more
flexible.
-john
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