How To Pick Someone Who Doesn’t Know XML

Here’s a tip for you, anytime you hear someone say, “The XML specs aren’t really that complicated”, you know they haven’t tried to work with XML in any detail.  For a start, as soon as you start using the term “specs” instead of “spec”, you’ve got something that’s going to difficult to piece together.  When you get to the vast number of specs involved when working with XML, you’ve got a weeks reading just to get through them all.

Then you get the corner cases, the little oddities that trip people up. Prefixes vs name spaces, default name space and attributes, document node vs root node, the perennial “entities, characters, charsets and you”. That’s before you start trying to do anything with validation, DOMs, XSLT and the like.  This stuff is seriously big and seriously complex.

That said, all that complexity serves a very important purpose and I’m not suggesting that it should be removed from XML or that XML should necessarily be changed (though many others would). I just find it so amusing whenever people complain about some XML producing or consuming product not being 100% perfectly compliant with the standards because it’s just so easy to produce valid XML. Anyone who thinks that either hasn’t really worked with XML or has worked with XML so much they’ve forgotten what it’s like to try to learn (hint: these people are often on expert groups related to devising XML standards).