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

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

On Sun, 2018-09-02 at 11:08 -0400, John Dziurlaj wrote:
> 
[...]
> This is no surprise, as I’ve spent most of my time in the .NET space,
> where Microsoft has not seen fit to update its support of XML
> standards after its initial enthusiasm in the early 2000s. 

They actually tried and got strong pushback from customers.

> Support for modern XML technologies is centered around a single
> language, Java. XProc.org lists 6 of the 7 XProc implementations as
> Java based.

i think this varies - there's also C# support for XML tech, as well as
Python and even JavaScript. You don't see as much dot net stuff in the
libre or open source world because in the past Microsoft hasn't had a
very welcoming culture or fostered a welcoming community to it.

Mike Kay's response is very insightful, and i'll add that it was the
(over-)eagerness for XML in the early days, which Tim Bray called
Internet Fairy Dust, that led to getting those open source projects
behind corporate firewalls and overcoming a lot of the resistance to
them. Whether that's been good or bad overall is another issue
altogether.

i've also come to think of XML as working best in areas where
information itself is seen as part of a long-lived community, and maybe
that's a view that in the US might be seen as inherently left-wing, i'm
not sure, but at any rate not centred on making the most profit in the
short term and ignoring anything beyond that. Successfuluse of XML is
about strategy.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.holoweb.net/liam/cv/
Web slave for vintage clipart http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y work & consulting.