[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Has XML run its course?
In a sense, this was inevitable. By forcing SGML and almost every other data language of note to the sidelines, by setting up an addressing system that ties all information to the systemic definitions, by insisting to the world that one group has a "moral" hegemony for Internet content and the specification of the systems by which it is obtained, the webHeads got the focus they were after. Now they can't live in the spotlight. What does that mean? It means that almost every effort to use hypermedia theory and develop hypermedia applications became focused on exactly one medium, one organization, and to the eternal consternation of the markup specialists, one subset of SGML. All of the decades of research, researchers and resources are trying to pour themselves into one mold through one spec. Meanwhile, Berners-Lee and some of the core W3C architecture experts are squeezing out a backdoor called the Semantic Web with RDF, Notation 3, etc. leaving all the refugees they created behind in the somewhat squalid situation you have now. All of this, and Simon wants to blame SGML, others want to blame the committees, and so it goes. Yet this is a self-inflicted disease, a gold fever. Like the California Gold Rush, at the end, a lot more people live in California, but few with substantial assets except those smart enough to begin to farm, to build and sustain cities, to pick up the ungolden rocks and build homes and walls, to make sturdy businesses. The smart people won't abandon XML. They will take XML Schemas and learn to use them like a farmer builds a stone wall and marks grazing land from the vegetable garden. Others will use XSLT to make meals of the produce and the meat. Some, unable to stand the enclosures of the commons will go looking for more adventure and some ideal of freedom elsewhere. In the end, most will have most of what they want, but a few will go to their graves cursing the farmers, cursing the bankers and yearning for the good old days when they could sling a tag-stacking HTML parser over their backs and go huntin' grizz. Jeremiah Johnson died in an old folks home with some great stories to tell. Some of his companions didn't make that far. Others died in very nice mansions also with great stories to tell but surrounded by the walls they made of the rocks they found after the gold rush. Be careful what you wish for. len
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