Re: [xml-dev] More predictions to mull over

[Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

Michael Champion wrote:
> I see that Elliotte Harold has published another set of XML predictions 
> http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xml2007predictions.html  
> This set particularly intrigued me because they remind me very much of 
> what my 2002 predictions might have been if I had written them down. 5 
> years ago, as best I recall without digging through the xml-dev 
> archives, I would have predicted more or less what he is predicting for 
> this year:

A lot depends on timing. Double bumps and all that. :-)

> 
> -          XQuery would be close to a Recommendation and fuel demand for 
> native XML databases of the sort my then-employer developed.

FWIW, I wrote that before the spec actually came out. :-) The real 
difference between now and then is that we have multiple real, solid 
implementations including open source products that are ready for 
production. That wasn't true five years ago.

> -          I don’t think Atom was even a glimmer in 2002, but I’m sure 
> that by 2003 the RSS mess was getting pretty ugly and I thought that 
> Atom would clean it up.

Atom's already here. My prediction is for the Atom Publishing protocol 
specifically, APP. I could be wrong but I don't think anyone predicted 
that in 2002. :-)

> -          XForms seemed ready to provide a non-hacky way to generate 
> real XML data from a browser.

Again it's the implementations that matter. I may be jumping the gun 
here, or I may be just plain wrong, but when I first looked at XForms 
seriously circa early 2005, the implementations were throughly 
inadequate and unusable. I don't think that's the case any more.

> -          People would grok that XML+CSS and/or XSLT in the browser 
> made all the ugly hassles forcing semantic markup into HTML unnecessary

But back then there was not reliable browser-side support for XSLT. 
Today there is. Again it's not just specs but implementations that make 
the difference.

> -          Alternatives to IE would flourish (I think I was an Opera 
> devotee back then)

You were right about that; just wrong about the specific alternatives. :-)

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
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