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Re: How long before services sending/receiving XML mightneed r

• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2021 14:37:46 -0500

Sort of?  I don't see "serialization format" locked into the question:

"If, say, governments currently require data or documents to be sent to them in XML format, what professional advice"

API development isn't necessarily about object serialization.  In particular, a lot of REST and HATEOAS is more open than that.  A lot of explicitly document XML documents are assembled by computers, meant to be sent over the wire, and even provoke meaningful responses from machines.

Thanks,
Simon

>  I can't say that XML's use WILL be perpetual, but I definitely think that it's reasonable that it COULD be perpetual. 

The original question is not about whether XML will stop to be used in general, but whether or not its use as a serialization format will disappear.

I believe that the main goals and use-cases for XML were not at all being a serialization format, even though it also achieved this. To be fair, very few human beings (if any at all) are sniffing the wires under a microscope, thus it isn't at all an issue whether or not any human-readable serialization format would/should be used for serialization -- we don't care.

If something like God exists (no offense intended for stronger believers), they would probably be watching network messages and understanding their contents, regardless of the actual serialization format being used. Maybe they have long ago established their own standard (reminds me somehow of "Invisible XML" :)   )?

Thanks,

Dimitre

On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 10:50 AM Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:

Hmm... so I've started fiddling with MIDI again.  That's a mere 38 years old and still going strong.  It now runs over USB and a few other options as well as the traditional dedicated DIN cables.  There is MIDI 2.0 work of course, but:

"MIDI 2.0 is an extension of MIDI 1.0. It does not replace MIDI 1.0 but builds on the core principles, architecture, and semantics of MIDI 1.0.

A foundational architecture for MIDI 2.0 expansion is defined by the MIDI Capability Inquiry (MIDI-CI) specification. MIDI-CI allows Devices with bidirectional communication to agree to use extended MIDI capabilities beyond those already defined in MIDI 1.0, while carefully protecting backward compatibility.

MIDI 2.0 is not a stand-alone specification. Manufacturers and developers must have a thorough understanding of MIDI 1.0 in order to implement MIDI 2.0." - https://www.midi.org/specifications/midi-2-0-specifications

There was, of course, a burst of projects deprecating and often removing XML from their systems over the last decade or so, as JSON (and sometimes YAML and sometimes other formats) took over data work that XML had been doing.  XHTML still exists quietly, but again, a lot of that vanished in roughly the same time period.

I don't get any sense in the document-centric worlds that I follow that people still working with XML are calling for revisions of the foundation specs or decommissioning.

I can't say that XML's use WILL be perpetual, but I definitely think that it's reasonable that it COULD be perpetual.  As with MIDI, there are people who want to do more (and less) and extend it in their own ways, but most of that seems (so far) to be contained to specific projects.

Thanks,
Simon

On 11/9/2021 11:30 AM, Stephen D Green wrote:

Hi XML Dev’ers,

Do you have any opinion on how long software systems communicating with each other (one-way or two-way) using XML might be able to continue to use XML this way? If, say, governments currently require data or documents to be sent to them in XML format, what professional advice would you suggest about how long would be reasonable before this use of XML should be replaced? Or do you think such uses of XML could reasonably be perpetual? 

Many thanks for your consideration.

Stephen Green

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Stephen D Green

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Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev

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• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: How long before services sending/receiving XML mightneed replacement?
    • From: Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@gmail.com>

• References:
  • How long before services sending/receiving XML might need replacement?
    • From: Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>
  • Re: How long before services sending/receiving XML mightneed replacement?
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
  • Re: How long before services sending/receiving XML mightneed replacement?
    • From: Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@gmail.com>