I’m not the only one who thinks XML could be made simpler: XML 2.0 proposal by Elliotte Rusty Harold. At least some of these ideas are good: predefining all the HTML 4.0 entities would be great; getting rid of internal DTD subsets and CDATA sections and leaving validation out of the core spec are winners; building in proper namespace support should have happened already. I’m less sure about others: XSD simple types are way too complicated, but I never felt the need for XML types to match the type system of whatever programming language I happened to be using.

As long as I’m talking about XML, Adam suggested in the comments to my previous post that vendors add complexity to solve the problems of their customers. I responded with another comment, but I’d like to expand on that. I do think that the problems of big enterprise customers are less complicated than most people think. The real problem is that enterprise vendors usually sell to people (executives) who don’t actually use their products, and therefore often base their decisions on check lists of features, so that the vendor claiming the most features wins. YAGNI (“you ain’t gonna need it”) is a losing proposition in this environment, so architects design for every possible contingency, which means things get more and more complicated.

A couple of interesting links via Cameron Moll:

Periodic Table of the (html5) Elements It’s fascinating how similar to the original chemical version this turned out.

Spacelog Original NASA transcripts of early missions, in an easy-to-read and easy-to-link format. (Each individual speech has its own URL.) So far they have Apollo 13 and Mercury 6.