James Clark: XML versus the Web

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

James Clark just posted an interesting blog:

http://blog.jclark.com/2010/11/xml-vs-web_24.html

Here are a few excerpts:

Personally, I got into XML not to make my life as a developer easier, nor because I had a particular enthusiasm for angle brackets, but because I wanted to promote some of the things that XML facilitates, including:

   *textual (non-binary) data formats;
   *open standard data formats;
   *data longevity;
   *data reuse;
   *separation of presentation from content.

...

Then there are the specs. For JSON, you have a 10-page RFC, with the meat being a mere 4 pages. For XML, you have XML 1.0, XML Namespaces, XML Infoset, XML Base, xml:id, XML Schema Part 1 and XML Schema Part 2. Now you could actually quite easily take XML 1.0, ditch DTDs, add XML Namespaces, xml:id, xml:base and XML Infoset and end up with a reasonably short (although more than 10 pages), coherent spec. (I think Tim Bray even did a draft of something like this once.) But in 10 years the W3C and its membership has not cared enough about simplicity and coherence to take any action on this.

...

So what's the way forward? I think the Web community has spoken, and it's clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON. XML isn't going away but I see it being less and less a Web technology; it won't be something that you send over the wire on the public Web, but just one of many technologies that are used on the server to manage and generate what you do send over the wire.

In the short-term, I think the challenge is how to make HTML5 play more nicely with XML. In the longer term, I think the challenge is how to use our collective experience from building the XML stack to create technologies that work natively with HTML, JSON and JavaScript, and that bring to the broader Web developer community some of the good aspects of the modern XML development experience.