Ajoke among developers goes like this: a few
of them meet one Saturday morning for a
round of golf, and one is complaining about
some trouble he’s in. A colleague from
another company says, “Don’t worry. I know
what to do. In our company, when there’s a
problem, someone somewhere always says, ‘Let’s use XML,’
and a miracle occurs!”
There is often an element of truth in such jokes. This little
story is funny because we all expect so much from XML that
somewhere along the line it has, to a certain degree, become
a witchcraft accessory — a talisman against evil, a remedy for
all our pains, hopes and desires. An increasing number of
companies insist on using XML in all their projects, although
they are not always sure why.
How has a simple markup language become so popular,
and where do the true advantages in using XML lie? Hundreds
of books have been written on the subject, and there is so
much XML activity in the computer world that an article of this
length can only skim the surface. We will thus concentrate on
a single area in which XML is indeed becoming a major
painkiller: localization.
To explain the benefits of XML in localization, it is worth
looking back down the road traveled so far. We first met
markup languages more than twenty years ago. The mother of
them all was Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML),
a meta-language soon to be followed by a great intuitive language
called Signed Document Markup Language (SDML).
Some people associate SGML with IBM and SDML with DEC.
While both companies participated extensively in the development
of these languages, made them popular and used them
as a priority for their own needs, many other organizations
were involved in defining and spreading these standards.
As we look at markup languages of the 1980s, we see that
one thing is true for them all: at that time they were exclusively
used for documentation. Building software or client-server
applications using SGML was unthinkable. Developers’ fashionable
languages were Pascal and C or the object-oriented
C++. SGML and SDML applications included browsers,
parsers and utilities. Consisting of pure text, they can run in a
heterogeneous proprietary environment on any PC, mini or
mainframe. They are, however, resource intensive, especially
when the content is voluminous or when even basic windowing
features are used. And their extreme complexity required indepth
programming knowledge if you wanted to use them
extensively. This combination of factors probably explains why
markup languages went out of fashion. Much lighter proprietary
PC editors soon replaced them, and WordPerfect,
Microsoft Word, Interleaf, FrameMaker and PageMaker
promptly entered the battlefield. IBM still uses SGML for its
own end-user documentation, and both SDML and SGML have
always been popular in large corporations and administrations
in sectors such as aerospace, automotive and telecommunications,
not to mention banks and the US tax administration.
Light but “closed” proprietary PC editors gave the emerging
localization industry a terrific shove. Seemingly easy to use,
the early versions of these applications were in reality tricky,
unstable and unpredictable when porting files from one version
to another. You needed an expert team to deliver the
turnkey document set in 12 languages on time. T
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