[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML doesn't deserve its "X".
3/5/2002 7:46:18 AM, Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...> wrote: >I am also (and maybe more) worried that nobody will ever want to change >the XML 1.0 recommendation and that we'll have ni chance to use what we >have learned since... Probably not. You mention basic data models -- RDBMS/tables, RDF/triples, and XML/trees. Let's think of the basic programming languages of the early 1960's -- COBOL/business, FORTRAN/scientific, and ALGOL/structured. These basic ideas have been combined, broken, and recombined repeatedly by individuals (Pascal), companies (Java), and committees (Ada). New ideas have been introduced (OO), both from the ground up (Smalltalk) and as add-ons (C++). When standards committees and government mandates tried to impose an orderly evolutionary process (Ada and COBOL come to mind), innovation came from out in the wilds of academia (LISP, BASIC) or industry labs (C). Even today when industry consolidation and quasi-monopolies have consolidated things down to about two dominant platforms (Windows and Java), and they seem to be converging on most of the same basic ideas (C#), there's a lot of innovation in programming languages out there in the wild. Python, Ruby, PHP all seem to be growing in popularity. So, sure XML is not the ultimate answer -- it's the re-capitulation of the "hierarchical data" meme after 15 years of submergence under the "table" meme. It came in from the wilds, even though Microsoft in particular nurtured it and propagated it. Sure, people are trying to force-fit everything into XML, just as they did with the relational model 10-15 years ago, some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't. Some of it will succeed, and much of it won't ... and in 5 or 10 or 15 years some new meme will come in from the wild and displace the now-ossified XML. That is the Tao of Software. >>>XML is now legacy. Its users community is screaming against any change >>>and its specification body seems paralysed by its structure and the >>>diverging interests of its members... Well, yes ... the Tao in action. It's actually the Tao of Technology, not just software. Check out THE INNOVATOR'S DILEMMA by Clayton Christensen (the Marketing types have appropriated the "disruptive technology" slogan without really understanding the book, IMHO). See the interview with him at http://www.inc.com/search/23854-print.html "Remember that when a new idea emerges in an established company, it needs to get funded. And the only ideas that get funded are those that help the established company make more money. That process favors the ideas that create improved products for existing customers, and tends to reject more innovative, or disruptive, ideas. That is what creates disruptive entrepreneurial opportunities." >> >>>It's probably time to look for the next wave! >>> It's out there somewhere ... the proverbial furry little creature out there dining on dinosaur eggs. I don't have a clue what it is, but it's out there. It will probably look as much like XML as C looks like Pascal or Ruby looks like Java, but highly refactored. And then it will get polluted/corrupted/ossified and the whole cycle starts over again ...
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