Re: [xml-dev] Is XML a programming language monoculture?

[Arjun Ray <arayq2@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 2 Sep 2018 11:08:43 -0400, John Dziurlaj wrote:

| In using XML and related standards over the years, XML Schema, XSLT, 
| XPath, and SQL/XML, a single number stands out to me: “1.0”.

That's 20 years, practically on the dot.  The XML WG/SIG (successor of
the original ERB/WG) wrapped it up on 1st September 1998.

Before 1.0, there were only working drafts, going back to the epochal
first cut, presented at the GCA Convention in Boston in November 1996.
	https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xml-961114.html

Which, in the light of subsequent events, had no serious differences.
For all practical purposes, that first cut at XML - the product of a
very intense three and half months of discussion - was 1.0, in all its
essentials.

Because the W3C took the whole thing over - when they realized that a
bunch of SGML geeks had, beating the odds, actually come up with
something useful - and froze the process, for its own purposes.

That first set of decisions - what of SGML to leave out, what to
retain intact, and what to modify, ever so conservatively, with the
WebSGML TC still in the offing - was never revisited.  In the event,
1.0 kept all the mistakes too, besides roundly ignoring much of what
became available in the WebSGML TC.

We're now twenty years into the dense ecosystem that has developed
around 1.0.  For better or worse, we're stuck with it.