Brent Gueth <creeva@gmail.com> writes:
I don't care if XML becomes as common as plaintext and everyone uses it, you can run into a problem in 20 years where XML falls out of favor and there won't be software to render it properly. This will lead poor fools having to redo all the documents all over again. This is not a good thing.
As has already been mentioned, ASCII is an encoding and plaintext is a format. And ASCII is being replaced with Unicode. Some decades from now ASCII will gradually go the way of the Dodo. This is inevitable as the vast number of people in the world require a larger character set to read and write than native English speakers. As for plaintext, one of the core design goals for XML is that it you'll be able to open it in any text editor and read it. If a file is human readable when it's opened in a text editor then it's a type of plain text. All XML does is place tags around text in order to give the text a structure that machines can understand. As long as you have a text editor, you'll be able to read XML. A good text editor can clean out all of the tags with a simple regular expression like "<.*[^>]*>". Script languages like perl, python, ruby or any other language likely to come down the pike will be able to process XML and convert it into whatever comes along in the future. Very few applications render XML directly (except perhaps word processors), everyone else converts it into html, pdf or other formats for display. SGML (XML's older sister) has been around for, what, twenty years or more? And all SGML documents are easily converted into XML. XML is simplier and designed to be around as an archive format for far longer than that. Think of the XML version of an ebook as expression of a work, which is then converted into various manifestations including html, latex (which can be converted to PDF via Postscript), html, tei as well as a plain text file with not markup. Most people will never know about the master version in XML, they only will see the file formats they use to read books. XML is only a long term and safe archive format which is flexible enough to describe both the structure of a text and if you want it, also the semantic content of a text. I suggest that you google for a basic intro to XML to get an idea of what it really is. If you know anything about HTML, XML is very easy -- you can think of it as HTML where you can invent your own tags. I personally don't like DOM and XSLT which are both used for processing XML and converting it into formats like html which browsers can render. But this is no problem because I can just as easily convert and XML document into a LISP data structure of S-expressions which Lisp, Elisp, Scheme or Guile can process very easily. Once you understand that XML is just plain text, you can use any software for processing text to work with it. As long as there is a text editor, an XML documment will never be lost. b/ -- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Bangkok, Thailand