I noticed I might have seemed to contradict my own

argument there in that MS did facilitate (as far as I've

heard) AJAX but didn't push through to wide adoption

the XML Island technology (and didn't continue XSLT

support in IE beyond XSLT 1.0). I guess the difference

*might* be that, if it is true what I heard that AJAX was

for the sake of providing facilities to an online version

of Outlook, then that would more obviously generate

revenue (directly) than would IE. Plus interoperability

of IE wasn't likely to return assured revenue either.

Just a guess. So the answer might just lie in money and

ROI as being the reason XML succeeded outside of the

browser but less so within it.

----

Stephen D Green

On 29 April 2013 14:54, Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@g...> wrote:

Mmmm.

 

XML adoption into other technologies (the ones typically paid

for in moderate or 'expensive' license fees, etc and used by

enterprises with the will to invest and consciousness of a likely

ROI) like RDBMSs was well championed by the sellers of

those technologies. It seems to me that browsers didn't have

such sellers who could adequately champion the adoption of

XML since they couldn't themselves see an ROI and couldn't

easily pass on the cost of the adoption. I don't think they would

have found the issues like 'hypermedia affordances' at all

insurmountable if they'd had the will or potential ROI to invest

in getting such things fixed. Afterall it was the like of MS who

invested in getting AJAX up and running and ensuring XML

was adequately specified by adopting early and providing the

contributions and feedback to the W3C XML WG(s) - along

with Sun and others who had big customers paying large sums.

Mere browsers didn't give such good returns perhaps so even

MS might have not put so much welly into getting the likes of

'XML islands' supported more widely (IMHO).

----

Stephen D Green

On 29 April 2013 14:35, Rushforth, Peter <Peter.Rushforth@n...> wrote:

Stephen,

 

MicroXML, like XML before it, failed to explicitly acknowledge the architecture of the Web, so

it will fail on the Web too, IMHO.  Failure on the web has little to do with namespaces, which

is the dominant 'problem' addressed by MicroXML.

 

If it had included simple hyperlinks, @href, @src, @type, @rel, it would have a better chance at

succeeding on the Web. 

 

But I think the major impediment to adoption on the Web is the browser, which plays nicely with

html/css, images and javascript but not with anything else.  So it is simply what Jirka identifies: developers

can use json-p across origins to get access to the data their applications demand, so XML is

as a result a non-starter. 

 

Funny thing, I only recently came across the SLink proposal and some commentary about it

from the browser crowd.    It seems that in the drive to eliminate 'application' semantics from

XML, the application called the Web was eliminated also.

 

Peter

 

 

---

From: Stephen D Green [mailto:stephengreenubl@g...]
Sent: April 29, 2013 09:02
To: Jirka Kosek
Cc: Simon St.Laurent; xml-dev@l...

Subject: Re: XML's greatest cultural advantage over JSON

Just comparing the time it took for XML to be adequately

supported in RDBMSs and application frameworks like

.NET and Java and the time it has taken for it to be adequately

supported in Javascript (and browsers for that matter) and

you get the idea the latter have either been rather tardy or

have lacked strong user demand, or there has been some

other major blocker not suffered by RDBMSs and application

frameworks. It's probably too late to think that that will ever

be fixed. MicroXML doesn't seem to have made any impact

on the problem. Probably nothing will. (IMO of course)

----

Stephen D Green

On 29 April 2013 09:50, Jirka Kosek <jirka@k...> wrote:

On 28.4.2013 14:22, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> XML had a chance with an open-minded crowd of people eager to embrace
> it.  By and large, we utterly failed to convince them.  Once other
> options emerged, they ran there.

I think that story is different. Javascript in browser doesn't have
usable XML API (DOM is simply ... DOM), but evaluating JSON with eval()
at that time was very easy (do you still remember E4X?). Also given the
browser security model you are unable to fetch cross-site XML resources,
but you can do the same with JSON-P. So with JSON it was possible to
walk around limitations in browser, nothing more. With better XML API in
browser and more reasonable security model situation between JSON/XML in
Web front-end development could be very different.

                                Jirka


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