On the Extreme Fringe of XML
by Roger Sperberg
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Pages: 1, 2
Extremists
Extreme seems to be the place where extreme notions are freely talked about. Let me quote a closing keynote address that got captured and put online:
Those of you with long memories will remember the late 1980s and early 1990s when some of our number were already convinced that SGML was suitable as a universal modeling language and said so, loudly and in public. The more rational, or at least more conservative, members of our community would say, "Well ... calm down, Eliot. [Audience laughs.] SGML is very good for what it does, but there are some things for which, even though you could do them in SGML, it would be pointless, it would be dumb. For example, to make a graphics format in SGML — no one would do that. [More laughter.] It would be dumb to make a programming language in SGML; nobody would do that." [Laughter.] I come to you from teaching a workshop in XSLT in which the home-run demonstration was using XSLT to generate SVG images, and I submit to you that that is a demonstration of the network effect in action.
No one thought that not being in markup would be a disadvantage for a programming language or a graphics language. But when we tried doing them in markup, we discovered a lot of advantages that we had never suspected. That's the network effect at work.
Well, I'm very glad that Eliot Kimber had those notions about markup, extreme as they were interpreted as being, and spoke up about them. Extreme is a small forum, intimate almost, and that made it natural that I met Eliot there. I went out to dinner in groups with Jon Bosak, Norm Walsh, Eve Maler, Henry Thompson, Dave Hollander, Steve DeRose, and Michael Sperberg-McQueen, markup pioneers whose names I would otherwise only know from the standards those names appear on. This is, after all, a place to talk about "technical aspects of markup, markup languages, markup systems, and markup applications." (That would be the "M" in XML for those keeping score.)
And, to keep things relative, at the first conference I attended, Syd Bauman of Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group taught a one-day workshop in Python and it's at Extreme that I first encountered a session on Eiffel and heard of Ruby. Who knew then that these would be such essential tools now? Well, Syd Bauman and Sam Hunting, I suppose, which is why I'm glad I met them at Extreme. Not just theory but languages. (I didn't forget the "L.")
Futurists
Librarians, markup theorists, programmers, even some actual extremists. There's more to the mix. Five years ago, I thought E-Books would be top of the heap by now. I was wrong. I first heard of approaches to overlapping markup (eg, nonhierarchical and hence non-easy XML) from Extreme. I sense that's a really significant area, but it hasn't had the impact I've expected.
The most interesting irrelevancy at that first conference I attended was another out-of-left-field keynote. In it, the speaker searched a photo database for images of "happy people" and one result was a photo captioned, "father watches daughter take first steps." That was mind-blowing — no "happy" in the caption! No "happy" synonym! AI in search, wow! And I learned that Doug Lenat of CyCorp was not so obscure. I would have predicted that Cyc's techniques would have revolutionized search as we know it by, oh, 2005. Well, not right, again.
At other conferences, and I have a publishing bent, I've heard Bill Joy (of Sun), Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, John Warnock (of Adobe) and lesser-known luminaries of the biggest players in the computing sphere speak about new directions. These guys don't keynote Extreme. The bigger names have had slick presentations and spoken knowledgeably about where we might be going, realistically it seemed to me, given their companies' influence on things. At Extreme, there's been as much interest in where we are going, and speculation sounds truly authoritative, but the content has most often been the reporting of the pioneers at the fringe, and not the business leaders' visions. And I don't think anyone knows exactly which fringe we'll be at next, but the ones discussed have all looked equally likely.
What's There
This year, the papers are divided into a variety of areas: schemas, Topic Maps and RDF, querying XML documents, XSLT, tools and techniques, theory and philosophy, markup of overlapping hierarchies, and uses and applications of markup, to use the categories and order offered by the official program.
The papers have not only already been written, they're already online. I like that. I could say, oh, the paper on "x" by "y" looks interesting. But the only papers I can say that about come from my short-term perspective. That's what I'd like to know about this year. All the things that I'd like to know about three years down the road, well, my track record at predicting what I need to know about what I don't know yet is mixed. The peer-reviewed approach by Extreme has just as many misses, but way more hits.
Frankly, some years I've preferred the closer-to-hand, stick-to-a-single-track approach I can take at the XML 200x conferences. Usually it's a different set of issues that take me to Extreme, a sense of needing to scan the horizon and know that I have enough time to prepare for what is coming three years or more down the pike. Like everyone, I have to pick and choose which conferences I can afford to attend, and I don't have the time for all that I want to attend. So what's good on the schedule at Extreme this year? Really, who can say yet? (Ask me in three years.) Some schema stuff. Topic Map meets RDF stuff. A keynote on how mainstream matters start out on the fringe (my thought exactly — I'm beginning to think like Tommie Usdin!). XSLT and overlapping markup stuff. Elliotte Rusty Harold. Michel Biezunski. Markup stuff for this and markup stuff for that. It's a conference about markup! There'll be stuff on what I already figure I need to know and stuff on things I don't yet realize I need to know — research stuff and graduate classes in XML. Some of the topics are extremely useful and some extremely abstract. Theory and practice. Fortunately I can find the real experts at hand to help me sort through things, like Steve Newcomb, Lee Iverson, and those Technorati guys. I always come back from Montreal thinking how extraordinary my experience was.
And, in the end, I guess the "X" in Extreme Markup Languages really stands for extensible too, because I always find that my horizons, knowledge, and possibilities have all been extended.
Extreme Markup Languages 2005 is going on now. The conference takes place in Montreal each summer. The conference website has links to descriptions of last year's conference, including Jim Mason's report on XML.com.
- Extreme blogs
2005-08-03 13:19:11 RogerS
