In his early days at Intel, Andy Grove was approached by an employee who
suggested the company start work on a personal computer based on its
chips. Skeptical, he asked what a personal computer might do. The employee,
searching for a good example, said it could be used to store recipes. Grove
thought about the millions he'd have to spend on research, development, and
marketing, then considered the imperfect but steady quality of an
alphabetized loose-leaf binder. He finally passed on the idea and decided
to concentrate on the lucrative business of supplying chips for traffic
lights.
What a maroon. Any dolt should have been able to recognize the potential
when it was presented. Right? Probably not. Andy Grove, no matter what you
think of him, has proven to be a fairly bright guy - and certainly capable
of making decisions that profit his company. But in the 1970s, it was
impossible for him to envision the potential of a personal computer. If he
could have traveled forward in time and seen Excel, Quark, Photoshop,
Oracle, or the current use of the Net, he would have understood that
putting a powerful processor on the desktop would eventually allow for
software to be written for nearly everything.
But how, without having seen it at work, would you explain "everything"?
With a typewriter, adding machine, and pencil as your basis for comparison,
how would you explain the PC and its uses?
Similar problems come up in trying to explain eXtensible Markup
Language. It's not really like anything else out there, so there isn't a
good comparison to be made. That's why the forced metaphors are so
uninformative. You may have heard that XML is the replacement for HTML
or that XML is like HTML, where you make up your own tags. Both of these
statements are more or less accurate, but in the same way that a PC is a
recipe repository might be true.
So then what exactly is XML? I think I can best explain it by telling
about my latest money-making idea. Read on.
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