Happy Birthday XML!

Few five years olds have had as much impact as our little XML has these last few years. What started out as just structured storage as really changed into computer technology.

W3C has done a great job is helping get all those standards moving. Several years ago, I never thought that XSLT would ever become a standard. Add in the impending XQuery, XForms and their brethren, I think XML is headed in the right direction.

Five years ends up being a long long time in software development. Five years ago I was doing cutting edge MFC Active Document (OLE) programming for a pen-based computer. I'd have never thought I'd be through COM and ATL onto something new by now. I think its amazing that XML has really matured in this time. I recently pulled out my old XML books. While its always nice to be early to the party, many of these books are really out dated now. I love the old examples of how XSL used to be written.

Ok, no more waxing nostalgic. With today's technology, I really like Microsoft's strategy of using it everywhere.

That's enough for me. All I have to say is that I am the converted. I used to think that XML was all hype...no hope. As long as you mentioned .com and XML in your prospectus, you could get venture funding (ok, that part is true, but those days are long gone.)

Are you a believer?
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Credit where credit due
2003-03-14 11:38:15 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

It's great that you are celebrating the birthday of XML. Just want to point out that XML was gestating for almost 5 years prior to its birth, primarily in the head of Jon Bosak, who envisioned a way to more simply solve problems he was having with SGML at Novell. Without Jon's groundbreaking work early on (acknowledged by Charles Goldfarb, the developer of SGML) XML, in whatever form it existed, would be much more primitive than it is now.

Thanks to Jon Bosak for all of his creativity, hard work, and perseverance.

Just a notation
2003-02-19 17:03:37 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

XML is just a notation,

it's ggod becouse it's an standard. If some one (Microsoft, IBM, etc.) pretends pattents on this then maybe that "someone" should remember this, it's just a notation, SGML sub-set, and everyone is free to make functions to access any data structure (API').

what is missing here is Prolog and Lisp, maybe those languages could be used instead of XSLT, XQuery, this is what we really need, then is it necesary X#?

XML everywhere
2003-02-11 09:48:01 mentata [Reply | View]

I think the best thing to note is that in 5 years, XML has stayed v1.0. A stable standard is the best kind, because from there everything is progress.

It was a long time coming. I knew XML was going to be big because I'd worked with SGML in years past. XML 1.0 benefitted from the forum of the internet, an open development paradigm, a succinct but highly extensible scope, and a disciplined release. It's clearly here to stay, and I hope the core specification stays as it is.

On the other hand, I'm not so enthusiastic about Microsoft's "XML everywhere" direction. The most expensive part of software is not development, it's maintenance. How many DTD's will Microsoft hold? How many will change? How will they disseminate information on these changes? Perhaps most importantly, how will they welcome the new transparency of their formats? It's fun to plant flowers, but it's a pain to weed gardens.

Besides, XML is perfect for representing information in a single state, but that's not all we want to do with data. If you want to find needles in haystacks, you don't necessarily want the haystacks to exist exclusively as XML.

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

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