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

Advertisement

On this topic Recruiters endorse HR-XML proposal IBM will not charge royalties for ebXML patent XML presses the publishing business Speech technology for applications inches forward Corel jumps on XML, .Net for enterprise push

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:

<Invoice>
<From>Sean</From> <To>Conor</To> <Date>19590101</Date> <Amount>42.42</Amount> <Items> <Item>One bowl of petunias</Item> <Item>One sperm whale</Item> </Items> </Invoice>

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!