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Reprinted from
Disadvantages of XML - March 8, 1999
However, awesome XML is, there are some drawbacks which have
hindered it from gaining widespread use since its inception.
Let's look at the biggest drawback: The lack of adequate
processing applications.
For one, XML requires a processing application. That is, the
nice thing about HTML was that you knew that if you wrote an
HTML document, anyone, anywhere in the world, could read your
document using Netscape. Well, with XML documents, that is
not yet the case. There are no XML browsers on the market
yet (although the latest version of IE does a pretty good
job of incorporating XSL and XML documents provided HTML is
the output).
Thus, XML documents must either be converted into HTML before
distribution or converting it to HTML on-the-fly by
middleware. Barring translation, developers must code their
own processing applications.
The most common tactic used now is to write parsing routines
in DHTML or Java, or Server-Side perl to parse through an XML
document, apply the formatting rules specified by the style
sheet, and "convert" it all to HTML.
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"While it's true that browser support is limited, IE 5 and
Netscape 5 are expected to fully support XML. Also, W3C's
Amaya browser supports it today, as does the JUMBO browser
that was created for the Chemical Markup Language.
XML isn't about display -- it's about structure. This has
implications that make the browser question secondary. So the
whole issue of what is to be displayed and by what means is
intentionally left to other applications. You can target the
same XML (with different XSL) for different devices (standard
web browser, palm pilot, printer, etc.). You should not get
the impression that XML is useless until browsers
support it. This is definitely not true -- we are using it at
NASA in ways where no browser plays any role." - Ken Sall
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However, this takes some magic and the amount of work
necessary even to print "hello world" are sometimes enough to
dissuade developers from adopting the technology.
Nevertheless, parsing algorithms and tools continue to
improve over time as more and more people see the long-term
benefits of migrating their data to XML. The backend part of
XML will continue to become simpler and simpler. Already
Internet Explorer and Netscape provide a decent amount
of built in XML parsing tools.
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