[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] SGML/XML 98 Paris
A fairy godmother made it possible for me to attend the latter half of the Paris meeting and this is a brief report for other XML-DEVers who weren't so fortunate. I only get about one chance a year to meet real-life XML people - a year ago in Barcelona, and occasionally some visiting London. This report is not comprehensive - I missed anything before Wed a.m. The conf was wound up by Tim Bray who asked 'What is a document?' This is important as Tim now categorises himself - and most of us - as indulging in 'document computing'. Tim threw up slides of objects that may or may not be documents - music, a book with no words, a signed baseball, etc. The essential message was that in working with XML we are working with the material of human culture - in many forms - and that we can both enjoy it and have a responsibility. The responsibility is the trust that is put in us to manage information for the benefit of humankind. There is no doubt that 'XML has arrived' and is here to stay. Unfortunately I missed Jon Bosak's plenary (and I missed Jon). His plenary was highly praised and - I believe- again stressed the responsibility that we have to make XML work by always bearing in mind that we are part of a greater community. In a later session Jon outlined the next stages of the XML process. I date not attempt my transcription here as Jon chooses his phrases very carefully and with great meaning. He explained how the namespace proposal had come from the requirement of many W3-members and the narrow path that the WG had to tread. It had been essential to be simple at the outset to avoid committing to something that later might not be found to be workable. He stressed the need for the different W3 groups to work together (e.g. he did not feel a separate - and therefore potentially isolated - group for XML-data would be a good idea.) For many people the joint plenaries on Wednesday (Jean Paoli, Microsoft, and Bernard Feinmann, Netscape) were the key piece of take-home evangelism. Both represented their companies as committed wholeheartedly to XML. JP summarised some of the themes: - 'Data should be free' (Charles Goldfarb) - 'Give the user [power] (Jon Bosak) [I forget the exact words]. and emphasized the critical power of text-lovers and free speech on the WWW. He summarised the many initiatives of vendors and others as showing that XML had really arrived (including CML :-). He talked about XML and HTML interoperating (see a URL at w3.org/TR/NOTE-xh-19980511.html if I got it right) and how <SCRIPT> and <XML> had been proposed as HTML tags. The MS dream was: - let users craft their documents - let searches find anything - store everything in text - have readable, accessible formats He finished with a live demo of prototypes of the Office suite of tools based on XML. This included Word, Powerpoint and Excel (** all based on native XML **). This included a multi-dimensional numeric table from Excel with its complete representation in XML. This - the first preview of XML in Office - heralded XML in MS products 'this year'. BF outlined the NS philosophy, including that: - source code should be free Within 48 hours of the public Mozilla release, James Clark's XML parser had been integrated and there had been 25000 downloads of the source kit on the first day. Linux was the fastest growing OS and was the reference platform for Mozilla. JavaScript 1.3 was now shipped fully. The source is free and components can be depackaged - i.e. you can extract the bits you need for any task. NS was committed fully to DOM, RDF, XML. RDF was being developed for site maps and was a fundamental support tool client-side. Bookmarks, History, Filestore etc were all now built on RDF, and B gave an interactive demo of NS using these facilities. He showed how XML-based sites could be cut-and-pasted at any desired granularity. There was an editorial/advisory board including: Jon Bosak, Tim Bray, James Clark, Dan Connolly, and several other luminaries (sorry - didn't capture them). NS had 'complete and total commitment' to XML and all things XML. The main session I attended was the HyTime one. Charles Goldfarb outlined the history, including need to develop HyTime as an abstract approach to support music markup. As a result of that - and Eliot Kimber's presentation - I am intellectually convinced that HyTime and AFDRs are a right and clean way to tackle XML problems. Eliot wasn't happy about namespaces - HyTime does it all, simply and cleanly, and namespaces don't. I cannot comment with authority. He displayed his VB HyTime engine PHyLis (caps not guaranteed) and showed how AFs could be handled. Later I had a long masterclass sitting on the hotel floor and have made steps along the path to enlightenment. My position is that if there is an implementation of AFs in java, with a small number of examples, I will take the time to explore it. There appears to be some prospect of this. Masatomo Goto presented a very impressive demonstration of his Xlink engine (announced last week on XML-DEV). He has used HyTime as the fundamental infrastructure and implemented Xlink on top. Eliot described it publicly as 'very cool' and I wholeheartedly agree. If it could be made available to us for testing Xlink it would be a great benefit. The conference was very well attended and emphasised the commercial realisation of XML as well as the theory. In a straw vote, delegates felt that there was room for 'more technical material' in sessions next year. I left with a feeling of invigoration, sadness that I couldn't spend more time talking to people and an awareness of the need to keep the community spirit as long as possible. P. Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic net connection VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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