[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Partyin' like it's 1999
A radical suggestion: maybe what they really need are binaries and the creation of a binary specification can provide a subset of what is expressible in XML. They aren't the same, just that it might be easier to create a subset outside XML The Spec. My intuition is that the shock would come from elsewhere, such as new chip design or the sudden emergence of reliable telepathy. (Why yes, the siddhi are real; they just aren't reliable, Sherman.) Of the cases presented, isn't the really gnarly one namespaces? In other words, if the edges of that were tidied, how much pain would go away? Ok. Any parties interested in posting their favorite five bad problems with XML in order here? I wonder what the consensus is on the top two. (XML, not XML apps like XSD.) len From: Michael Champion [mailto:michaelc.champion@g...] On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 14:21:48 -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) <len.bullard@i...> wrote: I'm five years older, possibly 5 years wiser, and definitely much less convinced that I know what's best for XML or its users than I was in 1999 :-) I don't have an agenda here, just a bunch of questions. I honestly have no idea whether it's better to try to "fix" the things people are complaining about or just build better tools and document best practices to keep people from being snagged on them. I just find it intriguing that after five years of wrestling with this stuff, many smart people are ending up roughly where the SML wars started in the fall of '99. > > The other approach would be that critical individuals agree > (eg. Derek-Denny Brown, Dare Obasanjo, etc. at Microsoft, > Tim Bray at Sun, whoever their peers are at Oracle, etc.) who > then make the W3C aware that they will be moving to a new > consensus. (I'm not discounting the W3C, just that this > goes faster and more directly if the requirements originate > on the vendor side.) The vendors aren't going to do anything to reduce interoperability and "standards" compliance, and the W3C won't do anything without a very large push from the vendors. We're in an odd situation where everybody (well, more or less, AFAIK) knows that there is a problem but nobody has much of an incentive to do anything about it. It will take some external shock -- such as what gasoline prices did to the American auto industry in the '70's, or what Microsoft did to IBM in the 1980's, or what the Web did to Microsoft's desktop plans in 1995 -- to shake things up, IMHO. It's possible that the shock will come from customers who realize that the whole XML corpus is massive overkill for their needs and they shake things up by favoring the products/projects that have anticipated this and offer highly optimized price/performance for the core use cases. Or the mutant things descended from standard XML that find a niche in wireless apps or industrial-strength message processing may spread outward. Or a severe economic downturn could make bandwidth and processor capacity scarce commodities again. Or maybe end users exposed to XML in Office or whatever latch onto its potential, but rebel at the cruft. I really don't know, but sooner or later the days of huge specs that few really understand and can only be implemented "properly" by massive interop testing will come to an end. What I think would be useful in the short term is to: - Better understand which parts of XML, the related specs, and the XML APIs are really being used. - Use that knowledge to optimize products and profile specs for the most common use cases, even if there is no real willingness to change the specs. - Let those who need to use the subsets, or out-of-the-mainstream ideas such as alternative infoset serializations, do so in their own little universes. Wireless comes to mind: they need much of what XML offers, but the whole package is just too much. - When shock comes, we'll have experience on which to base standardization choices, much like the XML WG had when the Web shock hit SGML. > I expect that some parts of this question are answered > by your presentation in DC next month, yes? If so, > we can take it up in the hallway. I wish I had answers! I did end the formal paper with something along the lines of "The main question in my mind is whether the pains people are getting from XML will be addressed by the W3C in incremental revisions, or by something dramatically different and incompatible that comes in from the outside. I prefer the former, but predict the latter."
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|