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A very positive article about W3C XML Schema has made the mainstream trade press. http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2765997,00.html "Now that it is finally out, the long-delayed XML Schema standard will catalyze the next big step in XML-allowing cross-organizational XML document exchange and verification. " "XML Schema's long development cycle gave vendors time to understand the specification and start writing compliant software" [in a related article] "Whereas the initial XML standard could be easily built and managed by anyone with an editor, many vendors plan to provide new tools to help shield users from the size and complexity of XSD (XML Schema Definition)." For me, this is good news/bad news. The good news is that XML is being treated as a mature technology by the mainstream. The bad news is that it may raise un-sustainable expectations: lots of OTHER things have held back cross-organization XML data exchange, the industry has yet to shake out the schema interoperability issues that are bound to arise, and (as we've discussed here) UI tools can hide ugly details, but they can't hide conceptual complexity. The Schema Recommendation lets the XML industry *begin* to address these issues in a systematic way, but I read the article as suggesting that the Recommendation signals the *end* of this process. This is "bad news" because it sets us all up for a wave of "XML is Dead" articles next year when the rough edges become obvious to ZDNet et al. (Recall the Java hype collapse in 1997-1998 ...) How do we strike the right balance between promoting XML's potential ... and warning that its outer regions are largely unexplored?
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