The State of XML: Why Individuals Matter
by Edd Dumbill
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Pages: 1, 2
Good News and Bad
The developments of the last year are, no doubt, good news for XML. More and more of the tools we need to make use of XML are now in place: whether for developers or those creating industry frameworks. New areas open to XML as standardization and implementation continues. And, finally, as new incentives are created, the attack of the angle brackets in the name of interoperability proceeds apace.
Not everything in the garden is rosy, however. Despite some excellent progress over the last year, there have been several disappointments, and also some new challenges thrown up. Linking and pointing in XML (the W3C's XLink and XPointer specifications) are still lagging behind. Hypertext seems no longer the darling of mainstream markup technology. The notion of competition in the Web browser market seems like a very dead thing indeed, and there is little leverage left for users to encourage browser vendors to directly support XML technologies such as XHTML. In fact, the cutting edge of browser technology seems to have transferred to the mobile market, where much better use is being made of XML to reap benefits in areas such as speed of parsing.
XML's increasing uptake as the natural choice for new file formats, coupled with the Namespace Recommendation, poses some difficulties for existing Internet infrastructure. Until now, the Internet Media Type (MIME type) of a file pretty much established its content (e.g, audio/wav, image/jpeg, text/html). Now it is possible to mix languages -- SVG, XHTML, and SMIL for example -- in one document. Beyond establishing such a document as text/xml, there's little more we can do. Clearly more work needs to be done to revise Internet infrastructure. This is much easier said than done, and it requires the participation of dedicated individuals. The steering of any specification through the IETF is no easy task. There seems little immediate commercial imperative for companies to fund such work.
Don't Lose Control of XML
As the XML family of specifications grows, and money flows into all things XML, there are dangers that loom on the horizon. One highly worrying trend is the apparent rise of political over technical motives for participation in W3C Working Groups. The implausible sizes of the Schema and Protocol WGs indicate that many vendors consider it important to be part of these developments. This is all well and good -- consensus can only increase interoperability -- but as one XML old-hand said, the new members from the fringe all feel the need to make some kind of contribution in order to justify their participation. The result is a difficult time for the WG chairs and spec editors, not to mention the inevitable consequences of design-by-committee. Perhaps the W3C should invent a new level of participation to suit the political needs of vendors without jeopardizing the hard technical work done by the core of the working groups?
XML Schema is considered by the W3C to be part of the new core of XML, together with XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML. That the specification caters to many needs is a weakness as well as its strength. Although unintentionally, the W3C has significantly raised the barrier for participation in XML. I wrote above that XML has an excellent role in lowering the barrier for participation in many areas, such as pagination or intermachine communications, which makes this increase in size of "core XML" all the more concerning.
Apologists for XML Schema typically counter protests of complexity by assuring developers that tools will shortly be available, and so they need not make the effort to understand all of the specification. (The fact that this excuse was at one point given to potential developers of open source XML Schema processors is breathtaking.) While most developers with a reasonable budget for buying software development tools will accept this reasoning, it results in not only a raising of the technical barrier for participation in XML but of the financial barrier too.
If global business using XML is ever, as the ebXML initiative intends, to involve the whole world, then XML cannot become a plaything of vendors who wish to spin up the version numbers game. At the basic level of XML, remarkably few resources are required to process it -- the simplifying invention of well-formed documents was arguably the gateway to XML's widespread success. To backpedal on such decisions now by further complicating XML, runs counter to the original intent of its creators. XML may yet become the victim of its own success.
This tendency to complexity underlines the continuing importance of heroes in XML. XML's history is littered with individuals whose vision and technical ability have made significant contributions. Vital technologies such as SAX, and more recently the emergent RDDL, may never have emerged if it were not for these people (not to mention XML 1.0 and XSLT). Yet we now seem to be in a position where many of the heroes have tired, and those that remain are seen as quaint oddities of the XML community by some vendors.
Perhaps that's right; now that the groundwork is done, and practical application is underway, aren't these folk just crazy idealists? Absolutely not. While considering the large scale deployment of XML in companies such as Boeing, recall that XML started with the vision and determination of a handful of people, and not as a corporate strategic initiative. From conversation with big industry consumers of XML products, it has become apparent that these companies actually value the contribution of individuals in the XML community very highly, for the role they play in keeping the software vendors sharp and on their toes.
The emergence of alternative XML schema proposals RELAX, TREX and Schematron -- all from individual contributors -- has done much to raise the profile of the technical debate about XML Schema, and it seems likely to have a positive effect on the future development of the schema language at the W3C. It's good to have consensus on the core of XML, but even W3C specifications continually need competition at a technical level, as there can be a considerable gap between what the vendors in the Working Groups want and what is in the best interests of users or XML itself.
Conclusion
The progress of adoption and change wrought by XML has accelerated over the last year, but with it comes certain dangers. XML must not be allowed to become so complex that it defeats the point of its original creation and unacceptably raises the level of financial and technological resource needed to use it. A growing reliance on vendor products also runs the risk of creating an identifiable market growth area, which, when it inevitably hits a decline, could take a chunk of XML as a technology down with it. Because of these dangers, the role of individual contributors in the XML community (whether affiliated with a company or not) is more important than ever. They remain among the most creative and influential participants in the development of XML.
- Rubber-stamping SOAP?
2001-05-31 18:26:38 Michael Champion
