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4/4/2002 5:58:04 AM, "Rob Lugt" <roblugt@elcel.com> wrote:
> I've come to the conclusion that
>this is inconsistent with the way that we all normally go about our
>business. In software engineering, the perceived wisdom is to perform small
>incremental changes, thereby reducing the overall risk of getting it wrong.
>Why should the evolution of XML be any different?
It won't be :~) But there is another aspect of evolution to consider, the
"punctuations in the equilibrium" or the "disruptive innovations." Gene
pools / meme pools can incrementally acquire complex adornments in a stable
and favorable environment -- peacock tails and orchid blossoms come to mind --
but more utilitarian organisms/ideas that can handle adversity tend to take
over when the environment is disrupted. The "evolution of XML" is indeed
producing longer and longer tails and ever-fancier blossoms, but it is also
setting producing a set of specs that is less and less likely to survive in the
wild.
For example, in the dog-eat-dog world of Web Services, SOAP (in practice) has
already deprecated DTDs, PIs, and treats XSD as mainly a meme pool to ransack
for good ideas (the primitive types and xsi:type are the main things extracted,
as far as I can see). Standards bodies and XML gurus complain that the ad hoc
web services specs are not using all the "good stuff" in XML, the web, and the
semantic web. The response of the web services community: create a new quasi-
standards body (the WS-I) to *select* those standards that really work rather
than *create* new ones. There is a lesson here ...
So, XML won't be any different; it will gradually sprout subcommittees and
features and incremental versions. I had a sense of deja vu reading this
thread back to the early 1980's when I would see incomprehensible (to me)
articles in ComputerWorld about battles over the direction of the evolution of
mainframe OS, COBOL, CODASYL, etc. technologies. The results of those debates
still "matter" in glass rooms all over the place, but not in the "wild." where
that stuff was displaced by PCs, Unix, C, RDBMS. Yup, XML won't be any
different...it will get incremental features piled on, then some disruptive
force will throw all but the most powerful ideas away, with very little remorse
for what was broken.
So, when we think about the evolution of XML, we need to think both about the
incremental changes to find local optima, and the necessity of staving off the
Grim Reaper of technologies that can't survive without lots of hype and hope
and consensus.
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