xml-dev - Re: XML Schemas: Needs Marketing?

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 09:29 PM 2/12/00 -0500, Bill la Forge wrote:
>Anyway, I strongly believe that as XML grows, we will be dealing with a
>larger and larger audience. And the W3C specs aren't going to make life
>easy. Perhaps, in the long run, much of that work will be (largely) ignored.

This is a concern worth taking seriously - usability and interoperability
seem like the big issues facing all of these projects, and I'm not sure
that the rapidly growing forest of specifications have enough of either of
these features.

While XML started out 'small enough to learn', the forest growing up around
it is much harder to grasp and integrate.  As a larger audience tries to
grasp what XML is becoming, I think we're going to see more and more people
opting for lowest common denominator solutions - because the full power and
glory is once again too damn hard to learn and use.

I hope for and expect to see subsets of functionality - XML 80/20'd the
complexity of SGML, and the XML family of specs will probably get 80/20'd
in real use.  Hopefully the W3C will write specs that accomodate such
subsetting.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com