breaking up?

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

After going away for a few days and catching up on messages, it seems like there's a fairly clear divide in this community, one which shows no signs of abating.

On one side - including myself - are those who were attracted to XML by its initial promise of a reasonably simple text-based markup system which would let people get their work done with a minimum of arcana.

On the other side seem to be people who find the results of XML 1.0 interesting but not nearly good enough by themselves.  These folks seem intent on decorating XML with a number of features - Namespaces, W3C XML Schema, XInclude, etc. - which add to XML's capabilities at some cost in its clarity.

Maybe it's time for these two groups to go their separate ways.  XML 1.0 itself, in my view, already gave the 'decorators' too many features, and we've been cursed with odd warning labels (think external subsets) ever since.

Maybe we should look at XML 1.0 as a shared foundation, but not expect XML itself to be a solution.  It's a starting point, both for people who want less and people who want more, a compromise that worked very well for a time but can't last forever.

I know that there are those who want XML kept as monolithic as possible, a shared set of tools which can be applied neatly in every situation.  The tools we have, however, aren't monolithic, aren't even necessarily interoperable, and give different groups of people very different problems.

I think markup would survive such a fragmentations, and survive usefully.  It already does.

Simon St.Laurent