xml-dev - XML per se

[Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com]

Title: XML per se

On 10/5/00, Matthew Gertner wrote:

> What would happen if after all this work XML just became
> a useful technology for reusing syntactical
> parsers (or something equally non-earthshaking)?

Actually, I think some of the most earthshaking aspects of XML are also the most boring:

1. Making it easy to create data formats with obvious, well-defined structure.
2. Making it easy to design special-purpose languages and vocabularies.

Even we used nothing outside of the XML 1.0 Specification, this would be significant. It's really important to keep telling people that there is a simple, small XML, and not every proposed standard is part of XML per se. Some of these standards will succeed, others will fail, but the core idea remains very powerful and important.

XML has made it much easier to exchange and integrate information. To do that, all you need is XML.

> How many of the numerous XML experts on this list are
> really keeping up with the standards and can make
> intelligent statements about more than a couple of them?

Bingo. You can be an XML expert if you really know XML itself and a few related core technologies (DOM, XSLT, DTD design, perhaps W3C Schema). There are many horizontal and vertical technologies or standards based on XML, and a good handful of XML-centric technologies like W3C Query that are under development, but you don't need to know these to get real work done today.

Sometimes media and marketing organizations seem to suggest that every new thing done with or for XML is part of XML itself. Sure, it is always good to learn from the things other people are doing with XML, and to see if there is already a well-designed solution to the problem you are trying to solve, but that doesn't mean I have to keep up with everything anyone is doing with or for XML.

> 2) XML is in its infancy. Is anyone claiming that this is mature
> technology?

In fact, the astonishing thing is that XML has come so far so quickly. Consider object orientation. Simula 67 was designed between 1962 and 1967, but it was really the early 1990s before object oriented programming became mainstream. Or consider UNIX, which was rewritten in 'C' in 1973, making it portable, but really caught on in the 1980s. Revolution takes time, because rethinking is hard.

I think what we have seen so far is just the first of several XML revolutions. So far, it has been largely limited to transient data, and many people seem to use XML to directly model their relational or object oriented designs, rather than doing designs that really "think" XML. I think we have a *lot* to learn about basic XML design. Think about how long it took before design patterns became well known in the object oriented community. We can expect several similar revolutions in the design of XML-based applications. Normalization of grammar-based schemas, design of applications that make intelligent use of semi-structured data, the use of data types in grammar-based schemas ... even if no new XML-related acronyms were to appear for the next five years, I think we would have plenty to think about.

And I hope that some of us do precisely that - spend more time thinking about XML per se, ways to design XML schemas in various domains, and the design of XML-based applications. While we do that, I think it's OK to be ignorant of a few of the new acronyms.

Jonathan