06.20.06
The XML Illusion
One of the things that people tout as a strength of XML is its “human-readability”. But we pay a big price, in terms of CPU, bandwidth, and storage, for the terabytes of XML that are parsed, shuffled, and stored without a human eye ever reading them.
By the way, you ever tried to read some of the stuff that comes out of, say, OpenOffice? To call it human-readable is a bit overstated. And don’t get me started on XML-based scripting languages! I mean it, don’t!
Allanimal said,
June 20, 2006 at 11:55 pm
Good point. I have tried to read XML and I usually just give up. I can’t be bothered, since I usually don’t have enough motivation (that is, it isn’t job related so I shift my focus elsewhere). I never thought about the CPU, bandwidth & storage aspect.
Thanks for making me think today. Sometimes I go for weeks without doing it.