Why FlixML?

When I started working on Just XML in the fall of 1997, XML still hadn't yet been born in any true sense, although it was being worked on. The final XML specification was still a few months off. There was only one book on the subject, Richard Light's Presenting XML, and of course a great deal of that was speculative.

It was challenging not only to learn about XML itself, but also to imagine what it might be useful for. With its roots in the Standardized General Markup Language, or SGML, XML was being touted as SGML's logical successor in supporting the wide range of fairly heavy-duty applications that SGML itself had long been considered useful for: the defense industry, banking and securities, medicine....

Sheesh, I thought, am I going have to spend the next X months learning about all that stuff, too?

(Not that I object to being educated about new things -- actually I kind of enjoy it. Not if I've got to learn about them with a book deadline hanging over me, though.)

On a Saturday night sometime around January 1998, we were watching Joe Bob Briggs' MonsterVision on the TNT cable channel. The featured flick that night was "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth."

Now, if you're not familiar with the film, here's a brief capsule description: Cavemen. Cavewomen. (Both sexes scantily clad, bronze of skin, startlingly well-coiffed given that the basic barber's tools of the era were blunt sticks.) Stop-action dinosaurs. And the most interesting gimmick is this: The dialog is all in caveperson-speak... not a single syllable of English or any other known language. (The most common word in 10,000,000 B.C., apparently, was "Akita." I know how it's spelled because I recently caught a closed-captioned version of the film.)

Well, we laughed along with Joe Bob about the film's various sillinesses. But I really wanted to tell other people about it, and the more I thought about how best to communicate everything I knew or could find out about it, well, something clicked.

Just XML, of course.

(By the way, you won't find "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" mentioned anywhere in Just XML. A full FlixML description of that movie will be a pet project of mine, which I'll post here on flixml.org as I work on it.)

At the heart of FlixML then -- aside from its virtues (such as they are) as an XML demonstrator tool -- is what it can tell someone about its subject: a B movie. The essence of a film is captured in its B-ness Rating.