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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: is that a fork in the road?
 Sitting listening to Henry's speech as I write. "XML trajectory and SGML trajectory as ... affected by slowness of getting style sheet language out"... I wonder how long that trajectory would have been if: 1. XSLT had not been primarly a means to downtranslate to HTML (something OmniMark already did well and a bit better); that is, a common existing renderer made XSLT a slam dunk compared to DSSSL. 2. XSLT had not been designed and overviewed by many of the same people who took the decade long march on DSSSL. That is, it is easy to walk on water when you know where the stumps are. At some point, the self-congratulating, "look at what we have done" aggrandizing of XML has to be seen for what it is: cheerleading to a very old and very done deal by the time "we" got here to carry a ball the last six inches across the goal line. Now, the deal is this: XML got complicated because the problem scope is hard as hell and expanding. "We" are trying to bridge systems worldwide and make that all *look* homogeneous. Now you have to define things that the previous decade's players left aside because their focus was NOT worldwide hypermedia. Now you have to agree on the much harder bits. If you aren't up to the challenge, take the fork out of the road, put it in the cake, and call it done. Then some group is going to make another cake and have at. They have to. Real requirements for interoperability, portability and now eXstensbility are the new goal. This goal was known long ago; CALS defined it. It was considered unattainable then, so people backed off and well... HTML, XSLT, XML and so forth. "Abstraction abstraction abstraction" and "Location location location" have been the problems since SGML was a draft, they are the problems now, and we solve them by punting them away or facing them head on. You have to decide what you want to do. I heartily suggest that people start discussing the differences between the plumbing and the refrigerator and decide what level they want to work at. We will NEVER see a grand unified seamless net unless we straitjacket every innovative designer on the planet. It won't happen. Kick that one away. It IS unattainable because once attained, it becomes unendurable or unsustainable. All Systems Leak. Pipelines too. You can agree to share parts of your solutions, you can agree to processes that enable you to choose among these, but you cannot arbitrarily stand in front of the innovative programmers and tell them not to use the solutions they design or think they have invented. Decide what you care about. Is it the infoSet, or is it the syntax? Is it the semantic or is the language for expressing a semantic? What is substance? You have to decide but the decision you make will be yours; join a community based on the requirements you share, or go it alone. Your choice. Choose wisely. Simple means if possible. No simpler than possible. Berners-Lee got the first part right and the second one wrong, but he made the discourse worldwide and immediate. You have to work your way among the abstractions and carry back to your customer the right ones. The target moves because we are ambitious. So to return to Henry's speech and inquire into "what an XML document is": pick a simple near target and you get a simple short trajectory. Pick one previously bombed and you get maximum coverage. Pick one far away and hard to hit, and you get to wait until you over fifty to see the first strike. Me, I'm already home. The cake is good. So far, we are eating our own cooking just fine. The next course will be a lot less tasty if we are already full or our appetites are timid. Take a break between courses and let the cooks know that is what you are doing. Otherwise, they bring you food as fast as a Sorceror's Apprentice brings water. Infoset pipelines look good from here. One will want to know where to put the tap to get the water. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@d...] I think that the main issue is that both the perimeter of "XML" as a whole and the XML community is expending very fast. It's easy for a small number of people to agree on a very focussed specification. It's more difficult when you increase the number of people or the perimeter of the spec and with XML we are seeing a growth on both axes simultaneously. The only way I believe this can be dealt with is through a real modularization of the specs. Otherwise, I think you are right, a fork is very likely to happen later or sooner... 
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