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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] open, closed, "SGML for the Web"
 Recent discussions have left me wondering whether the division in XML isn't just documents vs. data, relational vs. object, or infoset vs. lexical. It seems to me that there is something more at work. When XML first appeared, it seemed that its creators had at least aimed to make XML something generically usable over the Web. With the aid of XSLT or CSS stylesheets, for example, it's easy to disply content in XML documents, whatever the vocabulary may be. XML 1.0 was almost simple enough to avoid interoperability problems between different parsers, and pretty much all of the tools worked on any document out there. Application logic was (and should be) still an issue, but the nature of the underlying documents was clear. Elements, attributes, content, and a few more parts. DTDs muddied the water a bit, but for the most part an instance document was plainly a set of labeled structured holding content. The nature of the labels (names) and structures (end tags required) was clear. We could agree on what a document said, if not what it meant. Since then, we've seen all kinds of features added to XML. We've been told that we only need to use the features we want to use for our projects, and that we can run wild with the features we like. Some place in there, though, the lessons of the Web seem to have been lost. What began as "SGML for the Web" seems to be turning into "Markup for my particular situation which happens to use XYZ toolset with KTM options turned on/off." The Web-building idea that information is most valuable when most accessible, even on a lowest-common denominator basis seems to have been forgotten by the feature-hungry. It seems to me that the values which underlie much of the original XML intiative have been discarded by its successors. While we now have lots of new features, we also have tremendous new costs - learning curves, interoperability issues, software costs, and time spent trying sort out the implications of these new features. The new features are as capable (more capable?) of keeping us from communicating as they are of helping. I'm not sure that returning to a vision of XML in the context of an open Web (rather than, for instance, the current Web Services vision of putting XML and web technology to work in more tightly constrained conversations) would halt the growth of complexity. It does, however, seem like a focus on the open Web might at least encourage people to focus on the few things they have in common, and can solve in common, rather than the many things which keep them apart. Simon St.Laurent http://simonstl.com 
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