Re: Whither XML ?

Ha!  That's the first time I've seen that blog post.  I must admit it put an enormous smile on my face.  5 or so years ago when all the powers that be at W3C were doing their very utmost to turn XML and related specs a bloated, incoherent, over-complicated mess (e.g. XQuery data model, the AI-ization of RDF and the CORBA-ization of Web services) I yelled myself hoarse complaining, largely on this forum (I'll admit that one of the worst offenses, XML Namespaces, I only recognized as deleterious after the fact).

And now as I predicted, all that complexity and incoherence has come back to bite the committees, and it's their turn to complain.  Frankly a junta is how I perceived some of the W3C groups, and so it's interesting seeing that word turned against browser vendors.  Note: no offense to Mike Kay, as might be implied, whom I respect tremendously, and who I know was just part of committees, and probably prevented even worse by being able to implement things.  But the point remains that I don't see how browser vendors are any worse.  They just have different priorities from those clamoring for XSLT 2.0 and RDF, just as those who developed the XML specs I decried had different priorities from me.  I see it as fair turnabout, and if anything, I prefer the approach of the browser vendors: of myriad simple, scrappy standards, rather than a few behemoths.  I don't agree with them in all architectural matters, but I do find their work a lot more tractable than that of the OWL/XQuery/WSDL generation of standards, and I suspect I'm far from alone in that.