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Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> The field has certainly narrowed over the last year. There are only
> seven shows on the list of which two are more broadly focused software
> development shows with XML tracks, one is a Web show, and one is on a
> tangentially related topic.
I remember attending an AxKit BoF at OSCON a few years back at which
Matt Sergeant said something along the lines of "the XML world will
become truly interesting when XML itself becomes totally boring". As
much as I love working on infrastructural XML I believed back then that
he was right and I believe today that we're fairly close to that point
where XML in itself is quite boring, and everything of interest is
happening in the outer layers of the XML onion.
Of course, there still are interesting -- the XML geek in me wants to
say "fascinating", if with little hope for empathy -- issues such as the
general ineptitude of XML APIs, subsetting, binarisation, fragmenting,
packaging, querying (though that's close to having its first steps
done), better schema languages, much better IDness, etc. (pick the
subset/superset you care about). But we have to admit that those things
are of limited interest outside XML geek circles. They all have their
communities, but while some of those communities may reside in the first
layer of the onion or may be a chance to increase XML's constituency (to
other onions if the metaphor held), none of those are core to the
understanding of what XML is today.
So to bounce off the fact that you've brought to light, I guess the
question is "how much interest is there today in talking about XML per
se?" Most of the topics I mention above are in their infancies (wtr
adoption levels at least) so there may be a second wind for conferences
centered around XML, but other than that it's just slowly becoming too
low a layer for people to care. When was the last TCP/IP conference?
--
Robin Berjon
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