[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Whither XML ?
> 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. A number of people, knowing of the HTML5 battle between the standards-makers and the browser-makers, have interpreted my blog post as a salvo in that battle on behalf of the standards-makers. It was not intended that way (far from it). Rather, it expressed frustration that the standards community has missed the point by trying to define client-side standards such as SVG, XForms, and indeed XSLT 2.0 that can only be delivered if they were tightly integrated into the browser, something that is unlikely to happen rapidly if at all given the dynamics of the browser industry. It was a mistake to assume that one could define complex standards and lob them across the wall expecting vendors to implement them at their own cost, in software products from which no-one earns any revenue. I think the user community wants the facilities in these standards - or at least, there is a substantial market for such functionality - and I'm frustrated by the inability to deliver it. But I'm not asking the browser-makers to deliver it. Frankly, if we expect browsers to be free, then I don't see how we can make such demands. What I am asking for is for the browser to become a much more open platform, in which the browser-maker delivers interoperable extensibility and the rest of the community has the ability to decide what gets offered (and what gets used) on top of the basic platform: an architecture in which both the document markup and the functionality associated with the markup are open and extensible - and in which they are all extensible using standardized interfaces. I've heard suggestions that this can't be done for security reasons. I don't believe that; if programmability can be offered through Javascript, then I believe it can also be offered in a way that is programming-language independent. It just needs a virtual machine inside a sand-box - preferably not a rigid sand-box, but some kind of security architecture whereby the access of an application to resources on the user machine is firmly under the user's control. I've also heard suggestions that we can write anything we like in Javascript. Perhaps we can - but is it that really a reasonable way forward? When did we last have a computing platform that required all applications to be written in the same high-level language? I don't think anyone can dispute that the browser has become a bottleneck in terms of moving the technology forward. We're all constrained to move forward at the pace of the slowest browser. Some of the standards eventually make it - XSLT 1.0, CSS3, and SVG are examples - but it takes ten years. There must be a better way. Michael Kay Saxonica
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