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What, me worry? (was RE: Has XML run its course?)

• From: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@S...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 18:59:15 -0400

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 4:54 PM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Subject: Re:  Has XML run its course?

> 
> Speaking for myself, I'm quite confident that a few years
> from now, people will be doing lots of useful and interesting 
> things with XML, and based on the evidence, the probability 
> is high that at that time Simon will still be worrying on a 
> regular basis about the way things are going...  

Hmmm. Let's examine his track record.  I'll pick a month of the archives
arbitrarily... September 1998.

Three years ago Simon posted a note pointing us to his essay "Cement Shoes
for XML" .. the gist of which is that real XML support across Web browsers
will be slow in coming.   "Developers and others who stand to benefit from
XML are going to have to band together to get browser vendors to support
display of XML documents, or develop competing solutions and promote them
against the massive installed base of the older browsers."  I believe we had
that debate all over again a few weeks ago.

Other "worryings" from Simon back in September 1998 noted confusion about
what namespaces are all about (I seem to remember that topic coming up
"occasionally" since then!), the perennial question of whether XSL or CSS is
best for adding style to XML (I seem to remember another recent go-around
about CSS and XSL), and considerable skepticism about whether RDF added any
value vs. XML with well-chosen tag names (ditto).

I'd say (from my 10-minute research project) that Simon's track record of
worrying about things well in advance of the rest of us is pretty good.
Kinda reminds me of the time I got mad at my dogs for barking like crazy at
the stranger walking past the house next door -- "Stupid dogs, that's just
some guy walking down the street, quit worrying about him!" Turns out he had
just robbed the place.  

Stupid me for not paying attention.

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