Over the past few decades, I've seen wave after wave of people who think that the tools we have created here are a virtuous version of the One Ring, a single tool that will help humankind catalog and communicate everything in a neat and logical way, eventually binding them together to form a more coherent future.
Markup messianism might have made sense in the early days of XML,
when it seemed like we had something genuinely new here, or at
least something old on the edge of making a massive breakthrough.
Labeled structured exchangeable data is awesome stuff! I was also
way too enthusiastic in those early days.
Unfortunately, we keep tripping over our dreams. We just needed one more layer to make markup universal, whether it's graph structures, namespaces, a schema language, an enhanced transformation language, a new data store, modeling tools, adoption as a default format by popular enterprise (and consumer) software, or the world waking up to the magic we have to offer...
We've been through all that. The original cleanup process that
extracted XML from the many possibilities of the SGML Handbook
has been drowned in a blizzard of technologies many many times
larger. Even as developers and consumers and managers wandered
away, we kept offering more. The tangles only grow tighter and
more specialized, though occasionally lucrative. For much of the
world, XML and its related technologies are a lingering bad
memory.
There are good things among our many piles, but there are no universal solutions here. We have convenient syntax and tools for consuming and transforming it. We can suggest best practices for applying it to various kinds of information. We have bridges to a lot of other technologies, though many of those bridges were always partial and are lately decaying.
I hope that someday the SGML-to-XML cycle will begin again, that we'll sort through the piles we've hoarded with a different eye to produce something smaller and more useful. Getting to that, though, likely means that we have to want to do less, not more.
Thanks,
Simon St.Laurent
Markup minimalist
Real-life hoarder