Absolutely. Very well put. But is that sustainable? And for how long?
>Yet there have not been any marked improvements in the XML handling in 15 years
The developers of both the Java and .NET platform have left the field to third parties, and most third parties have found it difficult to establish a profitable niche (Saxonica being an exception!)
The biggest challenge here has been the open source business model. XML's success would never have happened without open source software, but at the same time the open source model doesn't encourage continuous innovation, because the value that users get from it doesn't flow back to the developer. The big corporates like Microsoft and Oracle and IBM stopped doing new XML work because they couldn't construct a business case that offered a return on investment, and the weekend hobbyists who created some of the original great products like libxslt stopped doing new XML work because they wanted their weekends back. The users who wanted new improved stuff found they were going to have to pay for it.
But the other challenge is that the first wave of products met 90% of users' requirements anyway, so even where better things became available and were free, users didn't move forward. Witness the fact that people are still using DOM, despite much better (and free!) alternatives being widely available. It reinforces the fact that old technology, if widely and successfully deployed, simply doesn't die that easily, even when better things are available.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
