Really enjoying the latest discussions.
Totally agree that to accomplish things people have to "do
something".
I am and I will and I'd like to be
involved.
But … but … before we build the next Empire State
Building.
What is it we really want.
Fundamentally ?
Lots of talk of features and simplicity and
compatibility … all great things.
But to the core of it, what is the "Mission
Statement" ?
There seems to be a *presumption* that where XML is 'failing'
its because it didn’t live up to "SGML for the
Web".
So ok, we want XML "on the web" whatever that means
…
But do we ?
I think it would be interesting to discuss *and
possibly agree!!* (ha ha) on what We Want XML(N+1) to actually
accomplish.
Do we really want or need to build from the ground
up with the goal of "XML On the Web" … ? Is that what everyone wants
?
Does it matter if 'we agree' ?
I for one, could care less if native XML 'rendered
in a browser'. I can translate XML to HTML for that on the
server in real-time.
Or in a mobile device in real-time. To me the
Browser is just a display engine. I don’t care what codes it takes
,they don’t have to be XML. As long as I can generate it from what I
have.
The days of static resources are last
decade,. Everything (nearly) nowadays is dynamically created. So
what does it matter what the rendering markup is like as long as it
works. The HTML(n+n+n) team are hard at work fighting that
out. I'm happy to let them and duck.
Do we want "XML as a Database" ? I like
that. I think we *have it already* .. although the tool stack could use
some revamping, but there are serious guns producing great tools for "XML As a
Database".
How about "XML as a data transfer serialization" ??
We have that !
XML to represents Documents ? We have
that !
All this talk to me seems to be to be largely on
"Getting XML into the browser" and "Making XML digestible by Web
Developers".
Sure ok, but what value does this have *to them" ?
Or to us ?
Why is this important enough to dedicate a few
hundred man-years on …
I hope for lots of disagreements … but honestly I
don’t see what the big problem is with what we have right now, flaws and
all.
XML can translate to
*anything*.
if I were to vote for a "New XML" it would be
something like gXML
http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol5/html/Lewis01/BalisageVol5-Lewis01.html
Something that actually approaches new problems and
solutions. I'm personally much more interested in making XML more
intrinsically useful as a data modeling language then forcing it down the
throats of web developers.
If we want new API's I'm all for it. The more
the better … although, IMHO, we have pretty damn good ones right
now.
So what's the Big Elephant were trying to achieve ?
-David
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David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org
