Re: [xml-dev] How long before services sending/receiving XML mightneed r

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

On 12/11/2021 08:12, Marcus Reichardt wrote:
> At the risk of sounding pedantic, i don't agree at all with what you
> said, Mukul ;)
> 
> [...] XML's other uses - as a preferred payload format for web
> services, and as go-to language for configuration and other metadata
> - have been on the decline for about 15 years as well.

Many of these were bandwagons (with the exception of text delivery).
Very attractive at the time ("Look! Only one format!").

> I think XML has a stronghold still in digital/cross-media publishing, 

This is XML's "home turf", and IMNSHO by far the biggest area, where
it's is the target or default in many publishing operations. It's often
done backwards, though: XML is decried because "we do everything in
Word"...but they still turn it into some form of storage XML after
publication.

XML has also become the default markup (TEI) in Digital Humanities, from
where electronic editions of thousands of texts may eventually end up
being published.

> but it's time to review the purpose of XML, or maybe find a new SGML
> subset or extension to bring markup back in line with what's actually
> needed,
Getting agreement on "what's actually needed" is going to be the hard
part. In fact, finding out who are the people who need to agree might
even be harder.

> such as an archival format (where XML may work well), an intermediate
> format in publishing pipelines (ditto), or an authoring format (where
> XML is a poor choice considering digital text is written in markdown
> and other Wiki syntax formats).

For the first two it's already working well as far as I know. I have
explained elsewhere why XML is not being used for authoring except by
people who already know it.

> The features dropped from SGML to yield XML (tag inference, short 
> references and other shortform syntax) were adequate for XML as a 
> delivery format; but at the same time, their lack is what gave way to
> a thousand ad-hoc syntaxes

That's a very interesting take. Living in my little XML bubble, I
haven't seen any of these. I had always assigned the emergence of other
syntaxes as a result of the way XML editors had been written.

> invented by people who actually want to write text without excessive
> boilerplate a la XML. 

People who want to write tend only to be interested in the interface and
the features it provides, not the underlying file format (with obvious
exceptions, of course, including many people here).

> It's time to stop this fixation on (the incidental SGML subset that
> is) XML and consider/preserve the larger markup tech context.

If a system provides the facilities the writers want (call them "markup"
although the writers don't need to be exposed to that), then it doesn't
matter what the file format is (with exceptions where XML provides an
obvious benefit like interchange, eg JATS, DocBook, TEI).

> And btw, UML has been on the decline as well - fortunately ;) I know
> of only few XML applications more perverse than XMI, the XML
> serialization of UML, chock full of XML antipatterns such extra
> lexical type systems (not DTD/XSD), <field name="name"
> value="value">, and so on.

How is DITA these days? 😱

Peter