Derek Denny-Brown

It seems like every programmer and their brother has picked up XML and is using it as the proverbial hammer to nail some solution. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. A lot of people have written about how XML doesn't scale, how XML isn't the right solution for problem X, but for all those complaints, XML has helped solve a lot of problems. What is more interesting is to see what problems it does appear to have gotten some of the most traction on. First, some background: XML was originally designed as an evolution of SGML, a simplification that mostly matched a lot of then existing common usage patterns. Most of its creators saw XML as evolving and expanding the role of SGML, namely text markup. XML was primarily intended to support taking a stream of text intended to be interpreted as a human readable document, and delineate portions according to some role. T... (more)