[Note: Last entry for day one (my brain is cooked), and it's more of a summary of my thoughts today than a summary of the current presentation]

I'm not sure if it's that my brain is getting full from all the info today, or that I simply haven't fully grasped these last two talks because of a basic lack of mental abilities, but I'm not really sold on what I've heard.

It makes sense, I suppose, given that I consider myself to be an "XML Skeptic." The main reason I went to the XML DevCon last year, and the reason I've returned this year, is that XML is a much hyped technology, and I want badly to see it live up to the hype. However, I'm not ready to be easily convinced.

While I've seen some things today that have resonated with me (I'm thinking mainly of Scott/Patrick and Whit), most of what I've heard has struck me as being either:

1) Totally academic

2) So narrow in scope that you feel like you're seeing an XML technology designed to accommodate a vertical space with a total company population of one

Obviously, I'm not being entirely serious. SOAP, for example, clearly isn't academic or narrow in scope. Just the opposite, in fact.

But, for every SOAP, it seems like there are about 14,000 ws-* applications that I'll never need to know.

To make matters worse, I find it extremely difficult to determine which applications I need to know. Don's talk was meant to clear some of this up, but I still have question marks over my head.

I should probably give the rest of the nerds in the world the benefit of the doubt, but those question marks over my head worry me. Before coming to Microsoft, I was very much an "in the trenches" developer, and many XML applications strike me as total ivory tower pie-in-the-sky technologies.

In short, I'm worried that the proliferation of XML applications causes more problems than it solves.

Let me tell you a story...

I had a flight once from the southern U.S. back to Portland. The guy who was sitting next to me was a bit nuts. He was giving the attendants a hard time, stuffing his bags under other people's seats (he brought about four pieces of carry-on, and stoutly refused to check any of them - the attendants complied, probably just to avoid a nasty scene), and just being a general nuisance. He only wound up sitting next to me because most of the other seats he had tried didn't meet his strange requirements. There was something about the seat next me that appealed to him - it was the porridge that Goldilocks chose.

Anyway, we hit cruising altitude, and the attendants came out with the food carts (this was back when they still regularly served "food" on domestic flights). He got the penne pasta dish with a salad and a roll.

When the cart was out of the way, he went into the aisle and pulled a huge duffel bag out of one of the overhead bins. After rummaging through it for about ten minutes, he put the bag away and came back to his seat.

I saw in his hand the reason he had to get up - he was gripping about fifteen packets of Taco Bell Hot Sauce that he probably retrieved from a small nest of dirty socks buried in the bottom of his bag.

He proceeded to open the hot sauce packets and use it to drench the pasta, the salad, and the roll.

Now, I love Taco Bell Hot Sauce. I feel that it really takes the Grade D Taco Bell meat to a new level of culinary excellence (mainly by masking its flavor). But, there are limits, and this guy sailed right on passed them. It was disgusting.

So, what's the point of this story?

The point is this: Many developers are this guy, and XML is the Taco Bell Hot Sauce.

I'll leave you draw your own conclusions.