xml-dev - Re: PC Week on "Why XML is Failing" ?????

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

"Michael Champion" <Mike.Champion@softwareag-usa.com> writes:

> Take your favorite antacid and check out
> http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,2551691,00.html
> 
> The essence of the article is that vertical industry B2B efforts are
> flourishing but the "pure XML" efforts such as OASIS are not:
> 
> "The losers are pie-in-the-sky XML-indoctrinated organizations, such
> as the Microsoft-spearheaded BizTalk.org and OASIS. The automakers
> chose to bypass BizTalk and OASIS to develop proprietary (but
> published) schemata. Every big organization will do the same, and
> though some of their XML work may feed back up to OASIS or BizTalk,
> every one wants standards for their cliques only."

I looked at the article, and it sounds about right (except for the
headline and the conclusion) -- I never bet much on the success of
schema repositories anyway.

In a sense, this is our own marketing hype coming back to haunt us.
Two years ago, everyone was pushing XML like a tower of Babel that
magically make all data formats compatible.  That sounded a lot better
than the truth -- that XML is a simple, common layer for representing
tree structures in a character stream -- but we certainly deserve our
share of headlines like this now.

Conclusion: XML is succeeding, but not by the criteria that many in
the XML community originally set.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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