Comment: Are we all on the path to XML hell?

Once again, Microsoft has found The Secret. I can't tell you what The Secret will be sold with, because I'm gagged by a non-disclosure agreement for a couple of weeks, or so, but The Secret, it seems, is Extensible Markup Language (XML).

What I find intriguing about XML is how everybody says they invented it. It's an industry standard, but everybody invented it; and Microsoft is definitely one of the inventors.

So, if one imagines - hypothetically - a new Microsoft product including XML as standard, you won't be surprised to know that it solves all known problems of office automation.

And as with HTML, which Microsoft discovered half a decade ago, the firm is going to tie XML tightly into everything it does. Though, of course, five years before Microsoft discovered HTML, the firm had said that Visual Basic was the solution to Everything ...

This can only remind you of the time Oracle discovered the network and decreed that the client-server model was dead; and that centralised Web servers were the way to go, and there would be no more problems.

So I wasn't altogether surprised to find that XML is now "the new VBasic" and "the new Internet" and even "the new LAN" - what did surprise me, however, was how very, very dull it all is.

If the answer to all the miseries of the universe is the filling in of automated forms, then of course we have to go along with it. But is a "user schema" really the highest aspiration of IT managers? Has our industry ceased to involve creativity, and is it concentrating instead on simple nuts and bolts and teams of beavering clerks setting up identical two-phase commit in a mental state of complete tedium?

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