Thursday, January 12, 2006
Don’t Invent XML Languages
ongoing · Don't Invent XML Languages: "....if you embark on designing a new XML language, there's a substantial probability that your effort will not be rewarded with success.
[Sidebar: Of course, to mitigate that risk, when you've finished designing your language, you have to take your show on the road and sell that sucker. You can no more hope to succeed without marketing than can any other technology. Some of us like marketing and selling, so for us this is not a big downside. But it will be for others.]
So right there is a good reason not to embark on this kind of thing: it's really hard, really time-consuming, and there's an excellent chance that it won't produce the results you were hoping for. In this life it's generally a good idea to stay away from projects which are difficult, unpleasant, and have a high chance of failure. And so far I've just talked about the personal expenditure of time.
Software Pain · If you're going to design a new language, you're committing to a major investment in software development. First, you'll need a validator. Don't kid yourself that writing a schema will do the trick; any nontrivial language will have a whole lot of constraints that you can't check in a schema language, and any nontrivial language needs an automated validator if you're going to get software to interoperate. Second, if you're designing a language that will be human-authored, you're going to have to arrange for there to be authoring software. This either means writing an authoring package from scratch (we're talking huge money and time and pain), or customizing one of the generalized XML-authoring tools, which is only moderately-less-huge time and money and pain. Finally, there's the payload software; you wouldn't be designing a language if you didn't want to do something with it, other than author and validate it. Someone's going to have to write that software. Software is expensive."
And this would seem to be true also of any semantic web vocabulary. Unless you believe in the vision of a fractal tangle web of meaning emerging over the web as a whole, bit by tiny bit, each new bit taking on the meaning contained in the links by which it is connected to all the rest.
[Sidebar: Of course, to mitigate that risk, when you've finished designing your language, you have to take your show on the road and sell that sucker. You can no more hope to succeed without marketing than can any other technology. Some of us like marketing and selling, so for us this is not a big downside. But it will be for others.]
So right there is a good reason not to embark on this kind of thing: it's really hard, really time-consuming, and there's an excellent chance that it won't produce the results you were hoping for. In this life it's generally a good idea to stay away from projects which are difficult, unpleasant, and have a high chance of failure. And so far I've just talked about the personal expenditure of time.
Software Pain · If you're going to design a new language, you're committing to a major investment in software development. First, you'll need a validator. Don't kid yourself that writing a schema will do the trick; any nontrivial language will have a whole lot of constraints that you can't check in a schema language, and any nontrivial language needs an automated validator if you're going to get software to interoperate. Second, if you're designing a language that will be human-authored, you're going to have to arrange for there to be authoring software. This either means writing an authoring package from scratch (we're talking huge money and time and pain), or customizing one of the generalized XML-authoring tools, which is only moderately-less-huge time and money and pain. Finally, there's the payload software; you wouldn't be designing a language if you didn't want to do something with it, other than author and validate it. Someone's going to have to write that software. Software is expensive."
And this would seem to be true also of any semantic web vocabulary. Unless you believe in the vision of a fractal tangle web of meaning emerging over the web as a whole, bit by tiny bit, each new bit taking on the meaning contained in the links by which it is connected to all the rest.
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