On “Custom XML” (and why nobody should care)

“Extensibility · The “X” in XML stands for
“Extensible” and that’s because anybody can
invent an XML language. You could post a chunk of text on the
Internet like so:

X311-J

“And you wouldn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to
use the terms “tool”, “tier”, or
“frobnosticate”, because of the extensibility.

“Of course, doing that isn’t very useful. Most people who
use XML work with handy pre-cooked sets of tags like RSS or Atom or
XHTML or ODF or OOXML, and leave the extensibility to the people
who do the pre-cooking for us. Most times, you never actually see
the XML.

“History · But back the era of XML’s predecessor
SGML, and even somewhat into the XML era, there was this vision
that everyone should go out and invent new XML languages to meet
their own particular business requirements. I think that these
days, most people have come around to the view that you
shouldn’t do that.”

Complete
Story