RE: [xml-dev] Has XML run its course?

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Yep. Hurry up and wait.... Then there is the arguing over the names. 
I think Bosak et al will do something useful in UBL but that 
the mountain of legacy, competing efforts, etc will 
make penetration a hard task and that is always the case unless 
one is putting the language out in a vacuum.  Situation normal.

HumanML gets gapes because some  people  
dropped some fantastic claims about what the language would 
do.  Anyone involved in personnel, public safety, theatre, 
animation, anthropology, sociology and most of the humanities 
knows that this kind of information is already collected and 
applied.  The same gapes were seen when the first business 
and enterprise modeling languages were proposed in the 
eighties and in fact, some of the UBLers gaped widest but 
are now working on precisely these kinds of concepts.  Neither 
are that big a deal; just exercises in schematization, not magic.

It rare that markup specialists invent anything.  They 
take what is there, do the rationalization, name the 
names, structure it, and put their own names on the 
results. No one should get too excited by this kind of work 
except to see what can be done with the results.  People 
hunger for press; that is a disease as rampant on the 
web as a common cold in winter. 

The work itself is a yawner and why, I suspect, we enjoy 
our controversies on this list.  Keeps us awake. :-)

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Lowery [mailto:jlowery@scenicsoft.com]

Well, I got a smile from after hearing about OASIS' UBL initiative recently.


Brought me back to the days when I was at Boeing and some group that was put
in charge of standardizing the company's "data dictionary" told us we had to
change the names of items in our still-in-development data model. That was
fair enough, but we had identified bits of data that they didn't have in
their dictionary. So they told us to wait on naming these things until we
heard back from them. 

Never did hear from them again. Not that we felt it prudent to wait, mind
you...

Maybe UBL will have better luck, but I'll in the meantime be plowing while
they're formalizing.