[Openstreetmap] Re: [Openstreetmap-dev] OSM's Schema - moving itforwards.

[Andy Robinson]

Ben Gimpert wrote:
29 November 2005 09:53
>
>Nah, I think this is buying the XML marketing more than the reality.
>
>Show an ignorant person the average stream of XML and they'll absolutely
>balk and make neither heads nor tails of it. The same is true of
>(X)HTML. However, show someone a simple CSV of rows n' columns and this
>is not the case -- most people are accustomed to table structures from
>their education. Tree structures require a trek up the learning curve,
>and tree structures with bloat-tastic sugar like XML take an even
>greater trek up the learning curve. And this says nothing about the
>classic tree -> RDBMS model conversion. Blech.
>
><rant> Though I'm certainly on my soapbox now, I believe XML will go
>down in history as one of the greatest failures of IT in the 1990's. It
>doesn't even achieve its own aims, and facilitates a *huge* amount of
>pseudo-work in the form of standards wanking. </rant>
>
>Open and public standards are vital to everything, but "open and public"
>does not equal XML.
>
>		Ben


And I'll third it. 

As an example, the Church of The Latter Day Saints is one of the biggest
organisations with genealogical interest. They produced a draft XML schema
back at the end of 2001 and then decided it wasn't going to work and dumped
it. Genealogy is one of those areas where lots of people need to share data
in a common format and XML has turned out to be surprisingly poor for that.

However... just because we share data RESTfully in an XML style surely has
no impact on how the server grunts. Clearly it has to be able to receive and
deliver the format correctly but that's an interfacing issue.

We already use GPX as a transfer means and I see no reason why we can't use
this as a continued basis. It's not overly complex and I think we can work
with it in a modified form. The wiki approach to the data throws out the
very idea of anything we use really becoming a "standard".

I see this XML debate more about providing a textural discussion format of
how the database works for us, rather than it being a restrictive set of
rules.

Was that a rant, if so please add your own tags ;)

Andy Robinson
Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk