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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] XML as disruptive of other Web techonologies
 For all the talk of XML changing the world, I'm finding more and more that XML is actually changing the Web technology it's meant to work with. While I hope to XML make an impact on the broader world, it might be worth a look at what XML is doing to the Web itself. A few examples are probably in order, so I'll look at MIME content-type identifiers, URIs, HTTP, HTML, and some general security and infrastructure issues. MIME types I've spent a good deal of time working on the latest XML Media Types draft, and it's quite clear that XML doesn't fit well with the two-part MIME content types system. After a lot of discussion, we've settled on a suffix indicating that MIME types, whatever else they may be, use an XML syntax, but getting there has been difficult. XML opens up new (generic) processing possibilities that weren't expected when MIME was originally created, and trying to integrate those possibilities with the existing MIME infrastructure is _hard_. (see http://www.imc.org/ietf-xml-mime/ http://www.imc.org/draft-murata-xml) URIs When URIs first appeared, they (generally) referred to specific resources. The shift (in terminology, if not so much in practice) from Locators (URLs) to Identifiers (URIs) made this a bit more abstract, but not nearly as abstract as the usage assigned them by the Namespaces in XML spec, which makes clear that they don't need to point to anything specific. (see http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/rfc2396.txt http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names) HTTP Related to URIs, and tied in the small battle here last week, is the use of HTTP as a transport protocol for other protocols - XML-RPC and SOAP. Some URIs that purport to be HTTP are now complex listeners and responders, no longer accepting 'ordinary' HTTP requests and modifying or ignoring the HTML forms-based GET and POST approaches to transmitting information from client to server. (see http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2617.txt http://xmlhack.com/list.php?cat=25) HTML The transition from HTML to XHTML is only getting started, but it seems like the W3C is moving forward with this potentially difficult project full speed - "HTML is dead, long live XHTML". On the other hand, it's very strange to see certain companies clinging to the old HTML approach, as that odd spam generated in Word 2000 demonstrated. (see http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-roadmap http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/2000/05/0111.html) Security and infrastructure issues Even apart from the data/instructions separation some claim make SOAP and its ilk dangerous, XML raises some new issues for both security and scale. David Megginson's keynote at XTech 2000 demonstrated that XML's reliance on external resources presents some significant new issues for document management and security, especially when such resources are shared. More recently, Eric van der Vlist noted the potential impact of four HTTP requests to the W3C's servers every time a strictly conforming XHTML document passes through a vanilla XML 1.0 validating parser. While we hope they're set up for that kind of traffic, this could get interesting - and more so as XHTML 1.1's modularization work proceeds. (Using public identifiers to reference local copies of resources may suddenly become more interesting.) (see http://www.megginson.com/ugly/index.html http://www.egroups.com/message/XHTML-L/79) While I don't think any one of these issues by itelf is a problem, I think it's reasonable to step back and assess the impact XML is having on these tools, which once seemed relatively easy to understand. If XML is indeed 'SGML for the Web', it's changing that Web by making new demands on the infrastructure. Simon St.Laurent XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. Building XML Applications Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth http://www.simonstl.com *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** 
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