OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

 


 

   RE: [xml-dev] Partyin' like it's 1999

[ Lists Home | Date Index | Thread Index ]

To comment further:  an inflection point is only perceived 
if the scale of movement exceeds the measurement threshold 
of any function that dispatches based on the interval 
(a difference that makes a difference).  

Functions are like viewpoints in chaos and complexity theory; 
they have a space of operation so to determine if an 
inflection point is a minor or major perturbation, you 
have to know or be able to measure the scope of the 
affective action (an encapsulated inflection may have 
no couplers of interest).   XML has couplers of interest 
everywhere.

1.  The mouse has many variants but is conceptually the same 
    device Englebart demoed minus the chording.

2.  The same can be said for keyboards.

3.  Except for cosmetics, the windows metaphor has changed 
    little.

All are commodities.  Low margin or not, big changes in 
any of these would have couplers of interest everywhere.

Is XML a low margin commodity?  Yes.  Worse, so are 
the implementations (I'm trying to be less elliptical) so 
unless the gains of refactoring are obvious and scale 
out of the view of the developers or attain a mass of 
support such that the mass is the observable, there isn't 
much evidence that there is an inflection point worth 
tracking.  I suppose if enough developers make enough 
noise, it might be.  

The other approach would be that critical individuals agree 
(eg. Derek-Denny Brown, Dare Obasanjo, etc. at Microsoft, 
Tim Bray at Sun, whoever their peers are at Oracle, etc.) who 
then make the W3C aware that they will be moving to a new 
consensus. (I'm not discounting the W3C, just that this 
goes faster and more directly if the requirements originate 
on the vendor side.) 

The question is then one of moving the application mass. 
That isn't certain with the buy-in of those 
individuals (the customers can resist), but it won't 
happen at all without them.   What one might ask is 
what changes require a change to the syntax features 
vs ones that can be achieved by subsetting as was done 
for SGML to create XML and for which there are examples 
as you noted.

I expect that some parts of this question are answered 
by your presentation in DC next month, yes?  If so, 
we can take it up in the hallway. 

len


From: Michael Champion [mailto:michaelc.champion@gmail.com]

OK, automobiles, television, most home appliances, homebuilding
technology ... lots of things have been essentially "good enough" for
decades. I'm trying to think of a computer-related technology that 
exhibits this (mainframes?  COBOL?).  In the technology industry,
who's not busy bein' reborn is busy becomin' a low margin commodity.




 

News | XML in Industry | Calendar | XML Registry
Marketplace | Resources | MyXML.org | Sponsors | Privacy Statement

Copyright 2001 XML.org. This site is hosted by OASIS