For the record, the reference to the Japanese submarine was to point
out that although the submarines of the West were good designs for the
mission of ship hunters, that mission focus limited the evolution of
the form in ways that precluded other missions. Further, it was the
combination of inventions that led to the next generation of vehicles.
Just as with aircraft, it took the inventions in engines, controls
and navigation from separate sources to enable the innovation that is
commercial aircraft, it took the separate inventions of nuclear power,
missile guidance and large self-sustained underwater craft with the
invention of the dry dock shelter to enable the emergence of the class
of modern submarine weapons platforms.
XML has been part of several different innovations in web technology.
Different more mission focused technologies such as JSON have stepped
into parts of that information ecosystem but none yet do all of these
well or at all. We seem to have arrived at a time I once said would
be when we would know markup had won and that is when we no longer
noticed itm just as today you don't notice the wing elevator flaps
that were the last piece of the system that is now modern aviation.
I do agree with Hans that professionals understand certain basic
principles of their craft and by these are known to be reliable (see
the emergence of freemasons for a comparative emergence and
recognition by shiboleths). I daily see cases where the tools
supplant the design leading to frustration and failure of mission or
mission creep. As I said, the body blow to XML is not of XML's
making: it was Microsoft's failure to provide a document-centric XML
editor and consigning it to Visual Studio as a coding language. This
was critical in bifurcating the ecosystem of enterprise tools. By
focusing their enterprise development on meta-data driven file
management (aka, Sharepoint), they lost the piece that increased the
*quality* of information and traded it for the slickness of graphics
design over basic file system interface.
While XML made recede in the bits on the wire applications given the
strengths of JSON and its fitness and form for this, the functional
aspects of document authoring and life cycle management are still
better served by XML. And it is here that there is plenty of room for
invention to presage innovation.
The web is still a mail carrier, not a document production
environment. By focusing on REST, the power of linking is realized
but the rest of the environment suffers a lack of discipline and
attention to design.
