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Software and Technology by
Hari
Posted on Sat, Aug 6, 2005 at 20:54 IST (last updated: Thu, May 7, 2009 @ 20:58 IST)
I have been poking around XHTML quite recently and this has led me to become more and more interested in XML as a real viable alternative to the standard HTML as a web markup language. A lot of people do seem to be genuinely interesting in XML and tend to believe that the future of web design may well lie with XML rather than traditional HTML. And from what I've seen of XML so far, it does looks to be very sophisticated, structured, powerful and complex. Not at all trivial. Of course, the concept of XML is easy at first sight. It is a meta-markup language that allows you to develop custom structured documents and data within documents. It is really simple to understand XML at the theoritical level, but rather more difficult to implement as a practical solution for day to day needs.
I was going through an XML manual today and it struck me that while XML offers so much power, it becomes very difficult to put that power to use in a simple context like displaying content on a web page. For example, with plain HTML it is so easy to display data because HTML is geared to display and formatting web pages. Simply put HTML allows unstructured document creation. With XML you're on your own. How you store the data is up to you, but when it comes to displaying it, you need to learn how to design a XSL style sheet that effectively converts and displays your XML data on a browser. For example, you might have a phone directory stored in XML format, but how you display it in a web page is more work than actually storing the data. It also requires much more thinking that merely using tags to display bold, italic or underlined text or just displaying a heading in a HTML page. The average web designer is not a programmer. XML development requires a designer to think like a programmer - think in terms of objects, metatags and abstraction: separation of formatting from the document source. As it is, most web designers have problems with CSS. Imagine how much more trouble they would have understanding the XML concept. Though I am a programmer, I myself find it quite abstract and hard to understand without placing its usage into a context. XML is a non-contextual markup language and that's what makes it hard in day-to-day use. You have to plan your document data organization all on your own. You have to understand how to structure your XML document and learn how to place seemingly non-structured content within that structure. Sounds a lot like database designing? More or less. And good database design is a topic that deserves entire books all on its own. What makes the use of XML so much more tricky in web design is that web pages generally tend to be unstructured at least in appearance. And it takes a lot of planning to structure and categorize content in a web page.
While I can see a lot of potential for XML in so many other contexts where data tends to have more inherent structure, I really don't see XML coming close to mainstream use in standard web development in the near future. XML is definitely for the hardcore developers - not for your average, fancy HTML web designer who uses Frontpage most of the time and has trouble understanding simple cascading style sheets properly. And going by the huge number of websites with poor design and the use of sloppy, malformed HTML, I really cannot see XML in mainstream use in website design and development.
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