RE: XML is _post_ OO

[Jeff Lowery <jlowery@scenicsoft.com>]

I was only half-joking about the catchy name thing, though. I've yet to see
a clearly articulated vision of what this post-OO (god, I hope there's a
better name than that) world will look like. What would I, as a developer,
stand to gain by refactoring <buzz> my objects into data model and
functional model?

I don't think XML adoption by itself will promote such an approach; it would
have the same effect that C++ had a decade ago: people will use it, but they
wouldn't use it *right*. What complicates the situation still further is the
lack of a data-centric history behind XML-- there's a lot of people using it
who couldn't care less about data transport and type safety.

So the idea of "Give them the tools, and they will understand" rings hollow
to me. Without a little proselytizing and religious fervor for the World to
Come, it will take us longer to get there, and it will be a mess when we
arrive. 

I wonder sometimes if the current alphabet soup that XML is swimming in is a
consequence of that lack of vision; or maybe there is one, but I just can't
see it for the growing thicket of acronyms that I find myself in puzzlement
about. In any case, without a focus, new initiatives and solutions will spew
forth like threads from a spider's spinnerets, and we may well get hung up
in the web of our own devising.