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Re: Even if you're not ... was If you're going to the W3C meet

• To: David Lyon <david.lyon@c...>
• Subject: Re: Even if you're not ... was If you're going to the W3C meeting in March
• From: Liam Quin <liam@w...>
• Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 20:18:28 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <200501281058.18074.david.lyon@c...>
• References: <Pine.LNX.4.44L0.0501271413090.7832-100000@s...> <e3a5cb2c050127121415118296@m...> <200501281058.18074.david.lyon@c...>
• User-agent: Mutt/1.5.6+20040907i

On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 10:58:17AM -0500, David Lyon wrote:
> Interesting to hear about W3C meetings....
> 
> in the real world it's:
>    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/297/5585/1259

Interesting to hear you think W3C isn't in the "real world" --
are we perceived as too academic (by you at least) or do
we ocupy some alternate universe? :-)

[...]

> I too have great respect for the Indian programmers that I've come
> accross in my career. They are dedicated and I'm sure that without
> them xml wouldn't have been able to have been implemented in
> nearly every language.... let me just list some..
> 
>  - TCL (bizzarre language, now has xml.. )
>  - Visual Basic, Delphi..
>  - Perl, python
>  - Java, C, C++
>  - any language ActiveX
>  - nearly every other language..

XML in C and C++ was first made possible by James Clark.

Java - David Megginson (and several others; was it Alex or Norbert who
was the first outside the SGML WG/ERB to wriet a parser?)

Perl by James Clark and Larry Wall, announced at the XML conference
in Seattle.

> yet, at the same time, the amount of use of xml in business seems
> if anything to be declining....  in a typical industrial area, Sydney, 
> Germany, UK, there isn't a lot of practical use of xml..
> and of course I could go into some of those reasons..

Oh, it's much more fun if you just spread doubt and uncertainty :-)

Wait until people are talking about the passing fad
called "grid computing" when everyone knows computers all
share resources anyway... :-)


Seriously, is it possible that XML has become part of the infrastructure
and you don't notice it as much?  When you open a document in Windows
XP, and the OS doesn't know how to handle it, it uses a Web Service to
find out.

I do agree with you that there are a lot of specs, many very large and
complex, built on top of XML.  On the other hand, there are large and
complex specs built on top of ASCII too -- e.g. C, C++, SQL, RTF...,
but people using C++ rarely say "I'm using ASCII to write a program".
That would be a confusion of levels.

I think the real business problems aren't about how to represent
structured data, or how to perform computation, but rather, how to
keep track of the number of camels in your herd in the face of
constant negotiation -- resource allocation, people management,
stock control, all much higher level things.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Even if you're not ... was If you're going to the W3C meeting in March
    • From: David Lyon <david.lyon@c...>

• References:
  • If you're going to the W3C meeting in March
    • From: Rich Salz <rsalz@d...>
  • Even if you're not ... was If you're going to the W3C meeting in March
    • From: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>
  • Re: Even if you're not ... was If you're going to the W3C meeting in March
    • From: David Lyon <david.lyon@c...>

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