[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Declarative XML Processing with XQuery
Fun read. When XML was SGML and not well-liked by the programming community, the documentation and hypertext communities that did like it conceived of many extraordinary uses for it. When SGML became XML and was well-liked by the programming community, most of those extraordinary uses dwindled as the programming community was as it always is, absorbed in the minutiae of tools and syntaxes, content to treat it as bits on the wire, not as a fertile ground for extraordinary uses. Thus to the world at large, XML became plumbing, a dull subject and mostly one that is well understood. I cannot conceive of a commercial like the one for faucets where an attractive venture capitalist is shown a software firm. She places a chunk of XML down on the table in front of a CTO and asks, "Can you design a business around this?" But I think perhaps someone will. len From: Michael Champion [mailto:michael.champion@h...] Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 7:21 PM Thanks, I'd heard rumors about this presentation but hadn't seen it. Really thought provoking ... especially if contrasted with Adam Bosworth's almost diametrically opposite position expressed in http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=337 The way I (perhaps crudely) would characterize the positions are that Adam thinks that XML/RDF is too complex to be useful, so "worse is better" things like HTML for text and RSS for data will become the mainstream technologies that are more derived from XML than really applications of generic XML. Dana agrees that XML is too hard for mainstream developers to process, so we need better tools and some fixes to XML to make it more RDF-like. I find myself more in Dana's camp than Adam's, but believe that XML/XQuery features will be absorbed into programming languages rather than vice versa. I do like her points about making XML more graph-friendly with links as first class citizens, but the implications could get messy .... Her points about declarative processing of XML are particularly interesting, but contrast them with Anders Hjelsberg's discussion of the evolution of mainstream languages to be more declarative in http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/TLN/TLN307_files/Default.htm#nopreload =1&autostart=1
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