flexibility (was: The subsetting has begun)

 (Sean McGrath) writes:
>I have an OS supplied copy command that treats my XML as a series of
>512 byte blocks:-)

To people who come from relational database or even binary file
backgrounds, that kind of generic flexibility is often no laughing
matter.  

XML opens a lot of XML-specific functionality to developers, but its
easy compatibility with non-XML tools for processing and storing text or
bits is a huge win as well.  

Even remembering back to my college job as a computer consultant, the
part of my job that involved recovering papers lost to angry floppy
disks would have been a lot easier if Word 4.0 had used SGML - or for
that matter any halfway-readable text-based format.

As long as I can get to the information, I don't care if it's a tree, a
shrub, or a skyscraper.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org