This is a single archived entry from Stefan Tilkov’s blog. For more up-to-date content, check out my author page at INNOQ, which has more information about me and also contains a list of published talks, podcasts, and articles. Or you can check out the full archive.

XML pipes

Stefan Tilkov,

Jon Udell suggests that the true synthesis of the Unix pipe model and the richness of GUIs lies in using XML instead of simple text input/output. I believe this is a very interesting idea, although clearly, just replacing tool-specific text output with XML output that is just as tool-specific will not buy you a lot. You would be able to use an XML editor, just as you can use a text editor to look at the output of a grep command; this will not make dealing with complicated outputs easier — after all, XML only streamlines syntax, not semantics. I’m not really sure I see the solution in XUL or XAML. Both use XML, true — but that doesn’t mean they make dealing with XML data easier (they might, but I don’t see how they would be more suited to this just because they use XML to specifiy UI layout; these are orthogonal concepts). Maybe the semantic web/RDF vision is not so academic, after all …