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Re: X12 sees the writing on the wall.
Nice job, William, you really have stirred up the pot a bit!
I mostly agree with your points, but I do have one minor disagreement with
your first paragraph here. If we consider the base grammars of X12 EDI and
EDIFACT (in ISO 9735) on the one hand, and XML as defined by the W3C on the
other, XML grammar has more productions, is more complex, and will
ultimately be harder to parse if we consider it at the most basic
level. You are right about the control characters in EDI, but you don't
want to disregard XML complexities such as predefined entities, external
entities, CDATA elements, and embedded comments. However, very few people
ever actually "parse" raw XML at this level. What makes XML *processing*
easier are nice things like DOM and SAX APIs that handle all of the lower
level parsing complexity for you and also do DTD or schema validation.
Once you get up a certain level in the processing model, the complexities
are very similar. Finding your way to a specific data element in an EDI
message or transaction set is very similar to finding your way to a
specific element or attribute in an XML document. The main difference is
that the former is most often done using proprietary EDI packages, each
with a unique approach, while the latter can be done using a set of generic
and often freely available tools with skills that are transferrable to and
from other domains.
And, back to the original theme of this thread, having been involved in
X12's work on XML for the past five years I think I can say that while X12
might see writing on the wall, it has taken us quite awhile either to
understand what it meant or to really do something about it. Expect this
to change in the next 12 months, but don't expect traditional X12 EDI to go
away. It is, however, certainly going into maintenance mode from a
standards perspective, and that trend has already been manifesting itself
for the past several years.
Cheers,
Mike
At 02:28 PM 7/16/03 -0400, William J. Kammerer wrote:
>I must disagree, Bill, with your bit about "parsing is the easy
>part--even in EDI!" Parsing EDI is a lot more complicated (than parsing
>XML), what with all the travails involved with separators and
>terminators, elements, composites, segments and loops. This thread
>started over the problem with loops - as there's nothing inherent in the
>EDI message itself delimiting the loop, whereas XML messages can have a
>naturally hierarchical structure. The complexities of parsing and
>mapping effectively prevent most folks - even those capable of writing
>good maintainable programs - from writing EDI parsers, and are what led
>to the EDI translator industry in the first place.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Michael C. Rawlins, Rawlins EC Consulting
www.rawlinsecconsulting.com
Using XML with Legacy Business Applications (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
www.awprofessional.com/titles/0321154940
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