Re: Why 90 percent of XML standards will fail

[Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>]

Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> writes:

> Supposed to be on ZDNet somewhere, but I saw it on Yahoo.  The guy's
> right, of course, but remember Theodore Sturgeon's Law of Popular Art
> Forms, which extends nicely to XML (or any other) standards; it says:
> 
>  "95% of everything is crap".
> 
> http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20010226/tc/why_90_percent_of_xml_standards_will_fail_1.html

Seems like another article of the sort intended mostly to provoke
responses: lots of general opinions, little specific information to
support them, and nothing about which specific standards he feels are
flawed and/or doomed to failure. And to me at least, the following
bits seem as provocative as the title.

  A standards organization has to align with the real strategic
  imperatives of major companies if it hopes to see useful
  implementations of its work. I see very little of this in the XML
  efforts underway. [...]

  There are only two abiding sources of XML standards. The first is
  the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [...] The second source is
  credible vendor that creates publicly available XML formats and
  protocols as part of meaningful products. Ariba and Microsoft are in
  this category at the moment.
  
  [...] the net effect of XML standards has been to slow adoption of
  XML products and technology.