Re: [xml-dev] Re: Native XML Interfaces

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Fri, 2013-05-31 at 21:08 -0700, Lauren Wood wrote:
> On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 7:45 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> >
> > Standards bodies are not really needed until there are multiple
> > implementations and a spec is in demand by users. Vendors benefit from
> > incompatibilities until the users insist on standards.
> >
> 
> Which was the case for the DOM way back when, or has everyone forgotten the
> browser wars?

One of my favourite poets, Steve Turner:

History repeats itself.
Has to.
No-one listens.

(the poem was repeated two or three times in one of his poetry books)

However, to be clear, it's XML DOM that hurt XML, not the HTML DOM, and
a significant part of that is that the difference between working with a
fixed and an open vocabulary.

I don't think the DOM itself failed (and didn't mean to imply that), and
in a way the XML DOM succeeded - it's widely implemented - but the
tedium of using it set many programmers' hearts against XML. The lack of
implicit dispatch hurt it considerably. But yes, one has to remember the
state of the art of Web browsers at the time, with NCSA Mosaic and
Netscape Navigator using a flat linked list to represent the document,
with start and end tags turning into separate "commands" like "end bold
now"...

Of course, arbitrary XML in the Web browser was scuppered by
. lack of XSLT and JavaScript integration (a W3C #fail, "we didn't do
APIs")
. no simple way for web crawlers to know how to index XML documents and
produce meaningful snippets (collective #fail)
. no way to include JavaScript in non-XHTML XML (financial #fail,
because you can't put ads or tracking code in the XML)

Liam


> 

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml