Tim Bray: "No New XML Languages"

January 10, 2006

I avoid XML as much as possible, but once in a while I’ve had a project where I thought about making an ad-hoc XML dialect. I’m going to file away Tim Bray’s recent blog posting to keep me out of trouble during those moments of temptation. His advice boils down to this: If you are tempted to make a new XML dialect, instead try fitting it into one of what he calls the the “big five”:

XHTML (including microformats)
Docbook
Open Document Format
Universal Business Language (I imagine this one covers the greatest number of hey-we-should-do-this-in-XML scenarios)
Atom

He concludes:

The next time one of your technical superstars comes into the room and says We gotta design an XML vocabulary for X, make them prove they can’t do it with one of the Big Five. And if they can prove it, sigh deeply and budget a couple of years delay, and a few thousand more engineering hours.