The Use of XML

[Christian Mathis]

Hi there,

in almost every paper on XML or any XML-related technology one can read
things like "Over the past few years the use of XML has grown
exponentially ..." or "XML is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for
retrieving and exchanging data ...".

Sounds cool, but I wonder: Is that true?

I spent the last three hours on finding information about the use of
XML, especially in business. I was not very successful. Google gave me
these two articles from 2001 (which do not satisfy me):

http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0226xml.html
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/762281

Now, here are my questions:
+ Does anybody know a recent survey on the use of XML and -- what I am
also very interested in -- the use of native XML database systems?

+ Can somebody approve or falsify the above statements?

+ Do you, if you are working in a company, also see these tendencies?

Thanks in advance,
Christian.

Ps: A sign on the door of a colleaque sais: "XML is like violence, if it
doesn't help you, you are not using enough of it."

 

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+ Can somebody approve or falsify the above statements?

I also think that the proliferation of XML is
vastly over-estimated by interested parties.
Nevertheless, I am sure that there is a substantial
mass of application in use today. The content of
web sites is often stored in XML and transformed
for visualization to other formats (mostly HTML).
The other readers in this newsgroup can tell you
more about this.

+ Do you, if you are working in a company, also see these tendencies?

We have some applications which already use XML.
But none of these really depends on XML as a
data format. In our company, XML usually replaces
ASCII format files and I can tell you that in some
cases XML has become an obstacle. For many years it
was possible to "grep" through files and now this
is not so easy anymore.

The most important impulse for developers to use
XML seems to be curiosity. They usually over-estimate
advantages and under-estimate consequences and complexity.