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I'm spending this week at two conferences in Portland, Oregon - the
O'Reilly Open Source Conference and the Sells Brothers Applied XML
Developer's Conference. The XML content at both is very different - OSCON
is largely tutorial XML for attendees in the other tracks, while Applied
XML is "applied topics for xml and web services zealots", higher-level and
certainly not tilted toward open source.
There's a lot of enthusiasm for XML, even after five years, though
fortunately developers aren't expecting it to magically solve their
problems. The enthusiasm has changed a lot, however. Instead of
impatience for the next W3C- or WS- prefixed spec, I'm finding impatience
for tools that make what we have work.
I've heard "XML APIs really suck" repeatedly at both conferences (and I've
only been at Applied XML for half a day!), as well as plenty of concern
that schemas have created an enormous and difficult problem set. When I've
told people that I'm retreating into XML 1.0 and grudging support for
namespaces, the response has ranged from positive to neutral. The one new
spec I hear people asking about regularly is XQuery, though I think to some
extent that reflects frustration with XSLT syntax.
I'm suspecting that the "standards tax" Don Box has spoken of in the past
has become too taxing. XML did an incredible job in promoting the notion
of a standard on which to build other standards, but at some point the
standards started both multiplying and growing at a phenomenal rate. I was
reading the SGML Handbook last week, and caught myself reflecting on how
simple and processable and interoperable SGML felt after five years in the
XML space.
A lot of people seem resigned to the standards treadmill, but most people
seem to have chosen little bits they like and decided it's best to hide
from the rest until they're forced to use them. Even within specs,
reducing a huge pile to the bits they like seems to be the preferred
strategy. (The presentation I'm sitting in now is doing that to WXS, using
only anonymous types to "make it work more like XML itself really works,"
as part of a larger practical project.) It makes for some odd
conversations between people who think they're using the same toolset.
It seems like different communities and individual developers are finding
less benefit from shared specifications. I've talked about this
possibility before, but this is the first time where I've seen this
happening so pervasively. It looks to me like subsets, experimentation and
competition are becoming the norms rather than conformance and formal
cooperation. With any luck, this will help answer a lot of the complaints
and concerns I keep hearing - frustration will hopefully lead to new
inventions.
(If you visit http://sellsbrothers.com, you can find lots of blogs covering
the Applied XML show. For OSCON, there's
http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2003/ , and there's lots more out there,
though not as easy to find.)
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