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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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