Re: How long before services sending/receiving XML might need

At the risk of sounding pedantic, i don't agree at all with what you said, Mukul ;)

XML is just an SGML subset envisioned as delivery format for *digital text* on the Web. But that failed for whatever reason, and XML's other uses - as a preferred payload format for web services, and as go-to language for configuration and other metadata - has been on the decline for about 15 years as well. I think XML has a stronghold still in digital/cross-media publishing, but it's time to review the purpose of XML, or maybe find a new SGML subset or extension to bring markup back in line with what's actually needed, such as an archival format (where XML may work well), an intermediate format in publishing pipelines (ditto), or an authoring format (where XML is a poor choice considering digital text is written in markdown and other Wiki syntax formats).

The features dropped from SGML to yield XML (tag inference, short references and other shortform syntax) were adequate for XML as delivery format; but at the same time, their lack is what gave way to a thousand ad-hoc syntaxes invented by people who actually want to write text without excessive boilerplate a la XML. It's time to stop this fixation on (the incidental SGML subset that is) XML and consider/preserve the larger markup tech context.

And btw, UML has been on the decline as well - fortunately ;) I know of only few XML applications more perverse than XMI, the XML serialization of UML, chock full of XML antipatterns such extra lexical type systems (not DTD/XSD), <field name="name" value="value">, and so on.

Best,

M. Reichardt

sgml.io