Article:		XML on the Web Has Failed
Subject:		Nice piece (if melodramatic!)
Date:		2004-07-26 09:38:44
From:		Danny Ayers
Really good to see the RFC 3023 issues taken to a wider audience, but as the other commentators have said "failed utterly, miserably, completely" is rather an exaggeration. The situation is more that there is a gap between specifications (XML 1.0, RFC 3023) and standards (hardly anyone implements according RFC 3023). I must nitpick again - Postel states "a general principle of robustness", not a law that should apply to everything. Specifically XML isn't designed to be robust, so rather than XML (done properly) being an exception, the law simply doesn't apply.

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• Nice piece (if melodramatic!)
  2004-07-26 10:19:16 markp_author [Reply]
  
  I have come around to agree with your point on Postel's Law. It doesn't automatically apply to every situation, and there are cases where it should not be applied.

  
  But the article's point is unrefuted: clients *aren't* being strict in what they accept. Yet amazingly, we bumble along anyway. The promise of "draconian error handling will save us" was an empty promise. Whatever interoperability we now enjoy has not been rooted in draconian error handling. Draconianism was a grand experiment, and maybe it could have ensured interoperability if clients hadn't been so buggy and the creators of XML had understood how it interacted with other specifications (like MIME) from the beginning, instead of being blindsided by it years later.

  
  Well, we'll know better next time...
  
  

  • Nice piece (if melodramatic!)
    2004-08-31 05:00:42 Danny Ayers [Reply]
    
    Hmm, yep, I can't deny your point that the interop we have isn't based on the draconian rules. But I'm not sure that means the experiment failed. If no client's implementing RFC 3023 and still we have interop then ok, maybe the draconian measures aren't necessary for most uses of the general web. It doesn't really counter points like Tim Bray's about controlled brittleness being desirable in e.g. financial systems. What do PayPal and Amazon do?