I must confess I’ve been learning to love XML, but it hasn’t been
always like this.

When I’ve first seen it, I thought it was a cool idea, but it didn’t
seem like it could achieve a practical value for me. After all, at
that time I was a VB programmer, and my concept of useful was dragging
buttons to draw forms and use Access for databases wink.

But time has passed, and I started to hear more and more about this
beast. Particularly since I’ve met Paul, which I think from the
persons that I talk to regularly, is the one who believes more than
anyone in XMLTopia, a world where all applications will be able to
interchange information using XML.

I fear though, that I may have joined the wave way too late. Now
that I’m starting to effectively use XML, I see more and more starting
to use RDF in practice. Yes, RDF can be serialized to and from
XML. However it seems like this serialization can occur in several
different ways, and still keep the same semantic value.

I’ve been working hard to try to make some sense out of the semantic
web, specially since it seems to be gaining speed amongst some
developers that I know. However, I must confess that it melts my brain
to try to follow their conversations. I’ve spent a couple hours
chatting with Joe ‘Arnia’ Geldart and it took me a full 3 days to
digest just about 5% of the information he gave me :)

Anyway, as I’ve said already, the situation is improving on my
end. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks on building a import/export
framework for Archetypes-based products. There’s a good summary about
it on PLIP44, which btw, I should update to reflect some of the
changes I’ve done to the xml dialect and schema.

To finish, it has been a pleasant time working on this. Much more
pleasant than I would expect, and I really hope more and more people
start drinking the XML kool-aid so we can meet all in XMLTopia one day!