Happy Birthday XML

Did you know that the Web is over a decade old? Does that fact make you
feel old? It sure makes me feel old.

There seems to be something magic about time denoted in 10-year chunks.
An uncanny number of technologies only really begin to make their mark
10 years after their inventors first put pen to paper. Stuff that works
seems to take a long time gestating in the Noosphere before it becomes
an "overnight success".

The Web is a good example of a well-gestated technology, finally
enjoying commodity status after a decade long journey. However, the Web
is a mere baby compared to XML. By my own unique brand of contentious
reasoning, I make XML 42 years old this year.

42 is an interesting number. For many technologists, it has a special
meaning forever associated with the author Douglas Adams -- author of
the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas passed away this year but
I'm sure he would have considered it totally improbable that anyone
would attempt to establish a connection between his work and XML. By
doing so, I have, for those of you familiar with the workings of
spaceships in his novels, created enough energy to get us to Alpha
Centauri and back.

And the tenuous relationship between 42 and XML is? Lisp.

That's right, Lisp. In 1959, Professor John McCarthy of MIT gave the
world Lisp -- a programming language with an interesting approach to
storing data (and code for that matter) in a hierarchical data
structure not dissimilar to XML.

Take, for example, the following fragment of XML:

Sean
Conor
19590101
42.42

One bowl of petunias
One sperm whale

In 1959, it would have been written something like this:

(Invoice
(From 'Sean)
(To 'Conor)
(Date '19590101)
(Amount '42.42)
(Items
(Item 'One bowl of petunias')
(Item 'One sperm whale')
)
)

The structure is known in Lisp as an s-expression.

Same information content, different syntax. I'm convinced that XML is
here to stay because it is, in many ways, an old technology. Older than
its birth date of 1998 would lead you to believe, and, if you accept my
reasoning about the parallels between XML and Lisp, a lot older than
the birth date of even SGML (1986) would lead you to believe.

So the next time a young gun drones on about XML as a breakthrough
technology, say something like, "All XML is a mere footnote to Lisp".
That should shut 'em up!

Read more about how-to in ITworld's How-to section

» posted by ITworld staff

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