QWERTY

Never was a blog title easier to type. Of course, it was easy because the keyboard is arranged to make it so.

The name "QWERTY" for our typewriter keyboard comes from the first six letters in the top alphabet row. It was invented by C. L. Sholes, who put together the prototypes of the first commercial typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop back in the 1860's.

As the (possibly apocryphal) story goes, the Qwerty design has little to do with modern efficiency - rather being optimally inefficient. The layout was designed to keep frequently used letter pairs (E and D or T and H) relatively far apart so that typists wouldn't hit them in quick succession, jamming primitive machines. Typists on early models were too fast!, by rearranging the keyboard Sholes was able to slow them down.

This interpretation of course misses the point. By arranging the keys in this manner Sholes almost certainly enabled faster typing as the typist wouldn't have to repeatedly stop and clear the keys. Qwerty was the (or at least one of) optimal design given the limitations of the striking technology at the time. It was only when the technology moved forward (e.g. those cool balls, and now PCs) that the designed limitation of Qwerty became irrelevant and sub-optimal. Until that point, the limitations of Qwerty enabled an overall more efficient system.

XML is almost certainly a sub-optimal syntax if the criteria are only on-the-wire speed and processing efficiency. Nevertheless, XML's advantages over binary formats (ASN.1 etc) in inspection and transformation outweigh the disadvantages. Overall, when taking into account design, development, testing etc, XML enables a more efficient system.

So XML is the Qwerty keyboard of this IT era. It may not be perfect but it's better than the alternatives.