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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Elliotte Rusty Harold on Web Services
 On Mon, 3 Feb 2003 06:53:46 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...> wrote: > If people want to invent or evolve something that's not XML, go right > ahead. But please stop calling it XML! Those of us who have to teach and > explain this stuff (and have taught and explained similar topics in the > past) have learned from brutal experience that the confusion this > approach engenders has massive, real-world costs in developer time and > productivity, though these aren't the sorts of costs that can be measured > by benchmarking code execution time. Having done a little of the assigned reading ;-) on philosophy of language over the weekend ... Isn't this the "identity problem", e.g. "am I the same person that I was 30 years ago even though my cells, appearance, ideas, etc. are mostly different"? I didn't quite follow the reasoning of Wittgenstein here, not surprisingly, but I'm pretty sure that I am the same person that I was, and that XML 2.x or 3.x will be "XML" even if it refactors out some of the stuff that has proven not to work well, or is suitable only to a very limited audience, and perhaps makes it available in an extension language or via a preprocessor rather than in the core definition. Sure that's confusing to those who want the world to be static, but less confusing than the alternatives IMHO. Change is going to occur, the question is whether the Powers that Be anticipate and accomodate the forces driving change, or force it to occur via fragmentation. > The various alternative markup languages people are inventing based on > their experience with XML should have their own names too, and should > stand or fall based on their own merits, not by falsely claiming to be > something they're not. The world being as it is, I suspect that whatever we "decide" here, the data-oriented applications of XML will drive the evolution of a new species of markup metalanguage that is more optimized to data, e.g. a more programming-like syntax, adding terseness and rapid parsability as design goals, and making it easier to compose multipe documents into a single legal document, etc. (I suspect that next generation markup language will look more like the RELAX NG compact syntax than XML 1.0, but I digress). Still, I think that alternative syntaxes for the Infoset, a more rigorous definition of what the XML data model really is, and a more layered architecture that allows document and data-oriented users to share what they have in common and fork only on what they don't share, can all live in the "XML" tent quite comfortably, with a bit of mutual respect and flexibility on all sides. > Java did not call itself C. That was a good thing, though it was clearly > an evolution of C. The history of C -> C++ -> Java -> C# is an interesting thing to ponder in this context: to me, it's not self-evident that Java did the right thing in forking rather than calling itself "C++--" or whatever. It went off by itself, we've had 5 years of language warfare, and now we have 3 contending languages (C++, Java, and C#) that share far more ideas than they disagree over, and whose syntax is easily confused for one another. I would prefer NOT to do this all over again (speaking of real world costs in developer time and productivity!) on the markup language side. 
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