eWEEK Translating XML Schema

[Michael Champion <mike.champion@softwareag-usa.com>]

A very positive article about W3C XML Schema has made the mainstream trade
press.
 http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2765997,00.html

"Now that it is finally out, the long-delayed XML Schema standard will catalyze
the next big step in XML-allowing cross-organizational XML document exchange and
verification. "

"XML Schema's long development cycle gave vendors time to understand the
specification and start writing compliant software"

[in a related article] "Whereas the initial XML standard could be easily built
and managed by anyone with an editor, many vendors plan to provide new tools to
help shield users from the size and complexity of XSD (XML Schema Definition)."

For me, this is good news/bad news.  The good news is that XML is being treated
as a mature technology by the mainstream.  The bad news is that it may raise
un-sustainable expectations: lots of OTHER things have held  back
cross-organization XML data  exchange, the industry has yet to shake out the
schema interoperability issues that are bound to arise, and (as we've discussed
here) UI tools can hide ugly details, but  they can't hide conceptual
complexity.  The Schema Recommendation lets the XML industry *begin* to address
these issues in a systematic way, but I read the article as suggesting that the
Recommendation signals the *end* of this process.

This is "bad news" because it sets us all up for a wave of "XML is Dead"
articles next year when the rough edges become obvious to ZDNet et al. (Recall
the Java hype collapse in 1997-1998 ...)
How do we strike the right balance between promoting XML's potential ... and
warning that its outer regions are largely unexplored?