Re: [xml-dev] Failed XML standards

[Kurt Cagle <kurt.cagle@gmail.com>]

Would you say that a new basic text book about XML should hardly
mention XInclude, XLink, and XPointer at all, at least not in whole
chapters, but maybe in some paragraph in a chapter about failed
standards?

Cautionary tales perhaps. All thee of these are link manifestations, and as such added not only expectations of semantics but also expected functionality that didn't effectively exist in a comprehensive factor in the distributed environment of the web c. 2000. XPointer was an early (and unsuccessful) stab at a query language for the web - it would take another seven years for XQuery to effectively replace it. XInclude works effectively in the closed environment of an XML database, but the possibility of recursive XIncludes made this a much more difficult domain problem in a distributed environment. Simple links already existed for most languages with implied semantics, and more complex links ultimately were made redundant with RDF and later OWL.

In other words, they failed either because they placed too many demands upon existing infrastructures, because they were shortly superceded by better technologies, or because solutions based upon them often proved to add more complexity than they solved (think Link Bases in XBRL).


Kurt Cagle
Managing Editor
http://xmlToday.org

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Jesper Tverskov <jesper.tverskov@gmail.com> wrote:

As we all know on this list, the XML article in Wikipedia contains the
following:

"Some other specifications conceived as part of the "XML Core" have
failed to find wide adoption, including XInclude, XLink, and
XPointer."

But what does it mean?

Probably all text books about XML have a chapter dedicated to each of
those standards.

Would you say that a new basic text book about XML should hardly
mention XInclude, XLink, and XPointer at all, at least not in whole
chapters, but maybe in some paragraph in a chapter about failed
standards?

Cheers,
Jesper Tverskov

http://www.xmlkurser.dk
http://www.xmlplease.com

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