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It’s not FUD … I don’t
have any vested interest in XSD prevailing, and the 70,000 people at Microsoft
probably have 140,000 different opinions on the matter. It is
probably hyperbole J -- obviously RSS/Atom and ODF/OpenXML aren’t
going away just because their normative spec changes from one metalanguage to
another. But I think it could derail XML’s overall adoption as the
de facto standard for data interchange. One reason is that after having experienced
the XML world through the eyes of our customers’ feedback, they tend to
see XML and XSD as more or less inseparable. For example, the #1 question
we’ve gotten about LINQ to XML (formerly known as XLinq) is “when
will you have schema support?” (See Ralf’s talk at XML 2006
for a progress report). That surprised and disappointed me (as a “dochead”
by instinct), but it’s the reality I have to live in. Second, the “cool people”
seem to be looking for alternatives to XML, or are treating it as a boring part
of the infrastructure that you don’t have to think hard about. XML’s
main selling point is its ubiquity; making people think about it rather than
just going with the flow is a prescription for fragmentation. That might
be a Good Thing in the long run (and a lot more fun than trying to figure out
why your XSD validator fails on somebody else’s conformance test), but not
good for the paying customers in the short run. Think what you want
about monopolies and noblesse oblige, “keep the customers happy” is
the rule by which I’m judged. Finally, I really don’t
think that XSD is dramatically “worse” than the rest of the XML
corpus. The people who really specialize in and understand the spec
can work with it, and the WG is addressing the worst flaws in 1.1 DTDs
are what cause us the most day to day pain. Namespaces are probably
second. If you are going to repair the foundation, why not just pull down
the whole house and rebuild it “properly”? There are good
reasons not to do this, of course, but I’m not sure we’d be able to
resist the temptation. From: Len Bullard
[mailto:cbullard@hiwaay.net] MC: “…at this point it
seems likely that XML itself will get buried in the rubble if the XSD towers
are pulled down” Most of us glossed right past that
statement. Are you saying that resistance to XML itself is serious enough
that changing the internal schema machinery or providing support for an
alternative would be costly enough or just enough friction to get the world
wide web of users, buyers, sellers and developers to adopt another data interchange
syntax? Is that FUD? Is that speculation based
on some other as yet undebated alternative such as JSON? Is this a
serious discussion inside Redmond or elsewhere? len |