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Re: PC Week on "Why XML is Failing" ?????

• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• To: "Michael Champion" <Mike.Champion@s...>, <xml-dev@X...>
• Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:13:39 -0700

At 01:17 PM 4/26/00 -0400, Michael Champion wrote:
>Is this worth a
>response ...?

I wrote a note to Taschek as follows:
==================================================================
Interesting article.  Although I think the headline was wrong - you are 
postulating that cross-industry consortia like Oasis & BizTalk may strike out.
Which may be right.  However, all those B2B efforts e.g. in the automative
space [interesting and not surprising that they're driven by the big buyers]
are using XML plumbing.  So XML as a technology is doing OK.  

I'm not surprised the that world isn't converging on One Big Schema
or One Big Consortium, and I think if you go poke around the people who 
actually built the framework (I'm one of them) you wouldn't have found many 
that believed in such convergence.  The people who were spouting that line 
tended to be the CommerceOnes and WebMethods of this world, who were in the 
business of selling vocabularies and frameworks.

After all, XML explicitly blesses anyone who wants to create their own
language for their own purposes.  That's what the X stands for.  The 
"premise" never included everyone using the same language.

I think there are going to be certain verticals where the consortium approach
is going to work, and others where it's not.  Probably in industries where
the customers is larger in number and smaller in size than the 
automomotive space.  For my money, pharmaceuticals looks like a vertical 
where vendor-driven consortium-moderated language-building ought to work 
pretty well.

But the plumbing behind the shiny press releases is still pretty XML-heavy,
end to end.  And XML as a technology is remarkably premise-free.  It's just
[really useful] syntax.

Cheers, Tim Bray [co-editor, XML 1.0]

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