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missing tools

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: missing tools
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 11:04:04 -0400

XML, despite its occasional ability to surprise us with new specs, seems
to be pretty widely regarded as a mature technology.  Given that XML 1.0
itself built on mature technology, that's probably not too surprising.

Despite that, however, I still hear an awful lot of complaining from
people (at conferences, in my workplace, etc.) about the immature state
of XML processing tools.  Some of those people are complaining about
sibling specs - schemas and query certainly among them - but at the same
time there's a lot of griping about the tools available for basic XML
work.

I've spent a fair amount of time - and wish I could spend a lot more -
on tools which provide access to the 'raw' XML document while still
supporting an infosettish context to facilitate its processing.  I feel
that XML processing launched down the infoset route at the outset, and
cut off a lot of possibilities by doing so.

Editors remain a constant complaint for some people, though the needs in
that space are thoroughly varied.

Data-binding seems to remain a hot-button out there.

Data modeling and visualization are also places where I hear a lot of
complaints.  XML visualization often seems limited to schema diagrams,
and I've heard of people who want tools that let them do things like
visual diffs over a large number of XML documents to analyze what
structures are actually used (or extended) by the documents.

Enough of my wonderings - what seems like it's missing to you?

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