XML is a pale imitation of a markup language. It has resulted in real horrors across the markup landscape. After years in its service, I don’t have much hope of that changing.
But, the Princess of the Northern Marches has organized a war council to consider how to stem the tide of bad XML. Despite my personal misgivings, I wish them well and invite you to participate as you see fit.
Oh, and I found this message about the council meeting:
International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in XML
Monday August 6, 2012
Hotel Europa, Montréal, CanadaPaper submissions due April 20, 2012.
A one-day discussion of issues relating to Quality Control and Quality Assurance in the XML environment.
XML systems and software are complex and constantly changing. XML documents are highly varied, may be large or small, and often have complex life-cycles. In this challenging environment quality is difficult to define, measure, or control, yet the justifications for using XML often include promises or implications relating to quality.
We invite papers on all aspects of quality with respect to XML systems, including but not limited to:
- Defining, measuring, testing, improving, and documenting quality
- Quality in documents, document models, software, transformations, or queries
- Case studies in the control of quality in an XML environment
- Theoretical or practical approaches to measuring quality in XML
- Does the presence of XML, XML schemas, and XML tools make quality checking easier, harder, or even different from other computing environments
- Should XML transforms and schemas be QAed as software? Or configuration files? Or documents? Does it matter?
Paper submissions due April 20, 2012.
Details at: http://www.balisage.net/QA-QC/
You do have to understand the semantics of even imitation markup languages before mapping them with more robust languages. Enjoy!
I think you are talking about at least two different things here: the quality of XML as a markup language and the quality of XML as it is used. This symposium will (probably) focus on the latter, but if there are suggestions on how XML itself can be improved in ways that will make applications and documents better in some way that will be in scope as well! Let’s talk about how to fix it; or at least how to improve our XML!
Comment by Balisage — February 14, 2012 @ 7:40 pm
I am not sure that XML as a language can be “improved” any more than we can “fix” verb formation in English.
Can create a new language with regular verb formation but then it is no longer English. Although understandable by most English speakers.
XML on the other hand has readers who make biblical literalists look like woolly-pated post-modernists. Any fundamental change and all those parsers fall on their sides or rather report it as “bad” XML.
Still, it may be possible to process XML in such a way as to remedy some of its shortcomings. It is, after all, a format and not a processing paradigm. (At least to some of us.)
Will have to give processing notion some thought.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — February 15, 2012 @ 11:03 am