XML at Five
by Edd Dumbill
|
Pages: 1, 2
Looking Forward
As XML marches on, what would you most like to see?
Ken Holman wants us to be one happy family, wishing for "community harmony." Michael Sperberg-McQueen also sees this as important.
"I'd like the community of users to stay together and avoid forking. That means the minimum defined standard has to be powerful enough to support what most people need to get done, even if if means having some things there that seem unnecessary for some specialized applications. It also means those with more stringent demands being willing for some functionality to be supplied by standardized applications, rather than by the core language. For a language intended for open data exchange and interoperability, it is more important that there be one language with as few optional features as possible than that the details of the language turn out in any particular way."
Rick Jelliffe had some markup-oriented wishes to share.
"I'd also like to see so-called microparsing capabilities increase, so that structures can be written using their natural notation where they have one. W3C XSLT2 and ISO DSDL look like they will improve life for this.
Oh, and I would like a thorough review of XML for robustness and reliability, and soon. The idea that the class of parser should determine the information to be presented to an application is incoherent. The question should not be 'how do we simplify XML?' but 'how do we make it more robust and reliable?' Ends before means; Viagra not circumcision!"
Henry Thompson would like to give XML users better access to their data, wanting to see "declarative data-binding, so that the choice between manipulating XML as XML and working directly with the data it (sometimes) encodes is not constrained by irrelevant overheads."
Ever optimistic, Simon St.Laurent wishes for a period of calm reflection. " I'd actually like to see a period of quiet -- less development -- on the specification side, and more effort put into figuring out what it is we already have. Computing isn't exactly a contemplative field, but too many people seem to be racing forward painting 'XML' on as much as possible without even wondering what that might mean."
Closing Comments
Finally, I asked my respondents if there was anything particularly relevant to this five year anniversary they would like to add.
Ken Holman expressed the sentiments of many, observing that "James Clark hasn't received enough kudos yet for all his contributions to our community."
Henry Thompson banged the drum for interoperability. "Interoperability is the key to XML's success -- let's keep it that way: say 'no' to subsets, profiles and alternative formats."
Rick Jelliffe reminded us to continue with the emphasis on internationalization brought about by XML. "XML is not a prescription for peace with the Muslim world. But respectful attention to allowing other countries and individuals to develop and flourish in the ways they choose surely is necessary and, God willing, sufficient. Standards for the WWW need to be made with this respect and care built-in, and everyone involved in XML's specification should feel proud of its internationalization."
I will, however, leave the closing comments to the eloquent Michael Sperberg-McQueen (who, with Dave Hollander, can also be found reflecting on five years of XML on the W3C web site).
My thanks to all of my interviewees.
"XML and related specs are a great achievement of the community. Without community support, involvement, and hard work, the original XML spec would not have been finished so fast, argued out so thoroughly, or adopted so widely. Later specs have built upon, and helped build, an even larger and more vigorous community. It's important that we remember to give credit where it is due: to the foundational work of the ISO SGML working group and to the hard work of the scores of experts who served on the original SGML-on-the-Web Working Group (later renamed the XML Interest Group).
Also in <taglines/>
It's worth noting that XML by itself does not do nearly as much as some people (mostly in marketing, I hope) have said. It doesn't solve all the problems of data exchange and data reusability: you still have to make the data rich enough to be worth exchanging and reusing. To tag data richly, you still have to know the data. Tagging 'everything that could be of interest' is still impossible (not just impractical, but impossible). All XML does is get some extraneous difficulties out of the way of solving those problems. It allows you to avoid tying the data tightly to a specific hardware or software platform. It allows you to tag what you think is interesting, rather than what seemed interesting to the programmers who work for your word-processor vendor. Compared with other approaches, which add to the difficulties instead of reducing them, that's a win.
Now that 'database' data and 'word-processing' data can both be processed in the same format, we have opportunities which we never have had before. I have heard too many document-oriented people whining about the horrible things the database people have done to XML -- imagine! They have forced the development of datatypes other than NAME, NUMBER, NMTOKEN, and CDATA for attributes! And I've heard too many database people complaining that the document people don't know enough about database theory -- imagine, the XML spec doesn't say whether an empty element has no content, or has the empty string as its content! How am I supposed to map that to a relational column with NULLs?
Be cool, guys. It's all information, and it's all information your users want to have access to in the same place. Document designers have been wanting better datatypes for years, and with every revision the SQL spec has migrated further from the purely relational model and closer to the directed-graph model of XML. Don't try to split them apart again, just to avoid having to deal with 'those people.' Learn to live together; you might come to enjoy it."
- Crazy XML apps
2003-02-13 08:35:30 Dorai Thodla
