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I'm spending this week at two conferences in Portland, Oregon - the O'Reilly Open Source Conference and the Sells Brothers Applied XML Developer's Conference. The XML content at both is very different - OSCON is largely tutorial XML for attendees in the other tracks, while Applied XML is "applied topics for xml and web services zealots", higher-level and certainly not tilted toward open source. There's a lot of enthusiasm for XML, even after five years, though fortunately developers aren't expecting it to magically solve their problems. The enthusiasm has changed a lot, however. Instead of impatience for the next W3C- or WS- prefixed spec, I'm finding impatience for tools that make what we have work. I've heard "XML APIs really [expletive deleted]" repeatedly at both conferences (and I've only been at Applied XML for half a day!), as well as plenty of concern that schemas have created an enormous and difficult problem set. When I've told people that I'm retreating into XML 1.0 and grudging support for namespaces, the response has ranged from positive to neutral. The one new spec I hear people asking about regularly is XQuery, though I think to some extent that reflects frustration with XSLT syntax. I'm suspecting that the "standards tax" Don Box has spoken of in the past has become too taxing. XML did an incredible job in promoting the notion of a standard on which to build other standards, but at some point the standards started both multiplying and growing at a phenomenal rate. I was reading the SGML Handbook last week, and caught myself reflecting on how simple and processable and interoperable SGML felt after five years in the XML space. A lot of people seem resigned to the standards treadmill, but most people seem to have chosen little bits they like and decided it's best to hide from the rest until they're forced to use them. Even within specs, reducing a huge pile to the bits they like seems to be the preferred strategy. (The presentation I'm sitting in now is doing that to WXS, using only anonymous types to "make it work more like XML itself really works," as part of a larger practical project.) It makes for some odd conversations between people who think they're using the same toolset. It seems like different communities and individual developers are finding less benefit from shared specifications. I've talked about this possibility before, but this is the first time where I've seen this happening so pervasively. It looks to me like subsets, experimentation and competition are becoming the norms rather than conformance and formal cooperation. With any luck, this will help answer a lot of the complaints and concerns I keep hearing - frustration will hopefully lead to new inventions. (If you visit http://sellsbrothers.com, you can find lots of blogs covering the Applied XML show. For OSCON, there's http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2003/ , and there's lots more out there, though not as easy to find.)
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