2003 is promising to be the most exciting year the XML world has seen since those halcyon days of 1998 and 1999, as substance fills in the space behind all the promises.

The biggest upcoming news is likely to grow from Microsoft’s recent announcements at the XML 2002 conference. Making it possible to create, process, and analyze XML documents using the Microsoft Office set of tools both opens Office to new possibilities and gives XML developers a whole new set of priorities for the kinds of information they can expect to see.

At the same time, it was a delight to see Rick Jelliffe of Topologi showing off the Topologi Markup Editor directly opposite the booth for Microsoft Word. To some users, Topologi’s close-to-the-markup editor may seem like a throwback to days they’d rather not experience, but for other users (myself included) this set of precision machine tools for markup is a dream come true. There’s room for both kinds of tool in the XML universe, and it seems likely that Topologi’s editor will get a lot of use exploring and tweaking documents originally created in Office.

On the Web side, SVG and XForms are both worth close examination. SVG’s adoption rate has been slow but very steady, with a tightly-knit core community doing all kinds of work. SVG’s latest iterations bring it formally to handheld devices and continue the W3C’s modularization approach, making it easier to integrate SVG with other XML-based technologies. (Visio’s upcoming SVG support is yet another reason to watch SVG next year.) XForms hasn’t yet reached Recommendation status, but it offers some powerful solutions to the nasty mess that HTML+JavaScript forms have devolved into.

On the standards side, RELAX NG continues to gain momentum. A much more elegant schema language with mathematical foundations, RELAX NG’s foundations are clean enough that it’s both human-accessible (especially in its compact syntax) and machine-readable (and can be converted into both W3C XML Schema and tables for use in J2ME cell phones). The ISO project including RELAX NG, DSDL, offers a lot of interesting technology for those weary of the enormous W3C XML Schema, XQuery, and XSLT/XPath 2.0 specifications.

XQuery is probably the most-awaited XML specification at the W3C, as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle all seem behind it. Whether it will break free of its enormous specifications and W3C XML Schema foundations to solve developers’ problems is a question in some quarters, but a question that should be answered sometime this coming year or next.

There’s lots more out there, but hopefully these tidbits are interesting enough.

Anything else you’re looking forward to in XML for 2003? Not looking forward to?

Related link: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1047.html

The RSS Validator now has a Web Service interface. It’s in alpha at the moment, and I welcome any feedback. I’ve also broached the subject of doing similarly for the XHTML validator, based on Ben Hammersley’s suggestion.

Related link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/28661.html

I don’t get to say very nice things about my New York State elected officials very often. New York government is a marvel of dictatorial gridlock, with three people making most of the decisions, if and when they can get along, which is rarely.

On the bright side, and separate from that triumvirate, New York’s Attorney General has a lot of power relative to other AGs. At the moment New York is blessed with an Attorney General who’s willing to use that power to clean up one of New York’s most important (and powerful) businesses, financial services. If we’re lucky, he may help build a foundation that will keep business from sullying the good name (well, sort of) of technology.

Spitzer’s latest victory offers a chance to rebuild the relationships between technology (cool stuff that lets us get things done) and business (let’s make some money). The strange behavior of analysts in the recent dot-com boom helped build fortunes, then wreck them as the reality underneath surfaced. “Irrational exuberance” may have affected the markets, especially around anything to do with technology, but there were plenty of people and companies happy to fuel that exuberance for their own benefit.

The settlement both strikes a blow at the old coziness between analysts and investment bankers and sets the stage for analysis that will hopefully peer deeper under the covers than was popular when everything was on its way up. If technology companies want money from the markets, they need to establish a lot of trust. Independent analysis of their prospects offers a better route to establishing that trust than the previous system.

Spitzer’s own statements are fascinating, exploring both the disconnect between predictions and results and the need for better-grounded predictions. Spitzer’s dream is pretty simple:

“My response to them is simple: if you don’t want to stand behind your recommendations, don’t make them available to retail investors. But recognize the potential benefits of transparency: once there are performance based measurements made publically available, there can be no doubt that banks will compete for — and generously compensate — proven stock-picking talent.”

While technologists often tout the benefits of encapsulation, business needs transparency. Making the technology-business relationship fruitful takes more than counting on an invisible hand - as Andrew Orlowski points out at The Register, that hand may be otherwise occupied.

It’s nice to see New York leading the nation, and a politician I voted for making a difference.

(Excelsior is the state motto for New York, meaning “ever upward”, and appears on the state flag.)

Does trust matter as technology moves forward?

The line between “thin client” and “thick client” gets blurrier every day. In the end, what really matters is a “standards-based client”.

Last week at XML 2002, I saw demonstrations of a couple of vendors’ tools that map a user interface to XML. A common theme is that the vendor’s application, and only the vendor’s application, can be used to fill the form. From the perspective of the vendor, this can seem like an ideal approach. Customers, on the other hand, have a different view.

People are passionate about their data, and will always demand full access to it. Thus, the mounting popularity of XML and related technologies. Forms are, like XML itself, a set of rules for a directed interchange of data; data about data; metadata.

Customers tend to resist efforts to standardize their core data, because it’s so important to them that they want to keep in in whatever format they choose. Metadata, however, isn’t thought about as much, and can slip through the cracks. But all the same reasons why full access is good for data apply to metadata as well, and having only a single option can result in vendor lock-in.

So if you are thinking about the data structure of your organization, think about open standards. Watch out for flashy interfaces wrapped over proprietary formats. As a bonus, you’ll find that multiple implementations of a standard tend to span the continuum between thin and thick clients.

Choices are good. Pharoah, eat your heart out.

Seen any thin clients or fat cows lately? Talk back!

Related link: http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1839

The big news at XML 2002 last week was definitely Microsoft’s announcement and demos of the next version of Office and its extremely flexible XML support.

Eric van der Vlist points out that such changes can have multiple effects for better or worse, but it seems we at least have some interesting XML prospects to watch for 2003.

For some reason, news.com seems hung up on the issue of what schema Microsoft is using. News.com doesn’t seem to grasp that you can do lots of things with XML with or without a schema, and perhaps the most powerful feature of Office 11 is that you can use it to process documents using your own schemas, applying Microsoft’s tools to formats you (not Microsoft!) control directly.

There will hopefully be a lot more XML in the world this time next year.

Is open data enough?

Related link: http://www.genomeweb.com/articles/view.asp?Article=200212212576

A new service detects the percent identity of a novel-candidate gene or protein sequence by comparing it against those registered in patent databases. This algorithm mirrors intellectual property law, and was designed to behelpful in making patent decisions. As opposed to traditional sequence comparison tools, this algorithin does not take into account phylogenetic relationships, so is not useful for traditional research projects.

(See also http://www.gene-it.com/media7.html for Gene-IT’s press release on the new service.)

Related link: http://www.xml-cml.org

The CML (Chemical Markup Language) DTD which has been in use for 3 years has now been upgraded to conform to the W3C specification for Schemas. All specifications and software are OpenSource/OpenData.

An email list to discuss CML and Computational Chemistry Markup Language (CCML) and related topics has also been started, see https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cml-discuss for details.

Just when the XML world seemed to be slowing down, Micrsoft announced sweeping new XML support in their upcoming Office 11 product, including “XDocs”, a piece of software that connects data entry with XML. Is Microsoft’s strategy a tribute or an insult to XForms?

XForms is definately interesting to watch. Kurt Cagle, in his Metaphorical Web newsletter says

“I have a certain perverse fascination with XForms … it is the one standard that almost nobody wants to see become standard, because it will effectively lay the foundation for replacing all of those $100,000 e-commerce packages that seem only to make things even more complex and entangled than they were before companies adopted these packages.”

[November 19, “Form and XForm”]

Unlike other acronym-loaded technologies, XForms had the luxury of developing mostly under the radar of faceless corporations and relentless hype, and the results are impressive on a technical level. People are starting to notice. Timothy Dyck of eWeek lists several technical benefits of XForms, and then says

“I can’t wait to deploy this technology in our own applications. There are big benefits for users and developers ahead.”

XForms a Huge Step Forward for Web Forms

Where does XDocs fit into the picture?

The general buzz is that all of Office 11 (which I presumably won’t actually see until it ships in mid 2003) can cope with nearly any XML, so that the familiar activities of users (like using Word and Excel) end up editing XML documents. XDocs fits into the picture by bringing another familiar activity–filling forms–into the Office fold in the new category of an “information-gathering” tool.

If anything, Microsoft’s moves add to the feeling of inevitabliity around rich client-side XML interfaces. From 50,000 feet (the usual altitude of a Pointy-haired Boss) XDocs and XForms applications seem pretty similar. What really are the differences?

1. XForms is a Royalty-free W3C technology. There are multiple choices of tools, both commercial and open source. You never need a subscription to Microsoft Office in order to fill in a form.
2. XForms is ready today. Even as you read this, people are already being productive with XForms tools.
3. As a W3C technology, XForms focuses on interoperability. The XForms Working Group is finalizng a Test Suite to ensure that no single vendor sets the standards.

One way or another, the “Universal Interface Virtual Machine (UIVM)”, as Paul Prescod puts it, is coming soon to a desktop near you. Will XDocs be a standards-based, web addressable, zero-install, client agnostic tool for everybody? Hard to say with an unreleased product. One way for Microsoft to kill four birds with one stone would be to make XDocs an XForms-based technology.

Yes, that’s right. Microsoft needs to support XForms, though they probably need some encouragement to do so. Every Office program has a “Save as Web Page” feature. What will come out of XDocs when you choose that menu item? For it to be anything other than XForms would be silly, comparable to “Save as Web Page” in Word not producing HTML. And from the competitive angle, it seems inevitable that OpenOffice and other software alternatives (including Mozilla, Xopus, and blogging tools) will support XForms or XDocs-like functionality in short order.

Kurt Cagle, from the same newsletter quoted earlier, says

“I have a feeling that XForms will end up being a disruptive technology that will significantly change the landscape of computing.”

What can you do to get ready for the Universal Interface?

• Start learning all you can about XForms and similar technologies. A good place to start is the book I’m writing, which has full text-in-progress available online.
• If you have contact with Microsoft, insist on XForms support in Office 11 (and IE while you’re at it).
• If you have contact with (or contribute code to) other projects, take a long look at XForms to see how it can enhance or simplify your user interface.
• Subscribe to the XForms mailing list by sending a message to www-forms@w3.org with the subject “Subscribe”. This mailing list is the heartbeat of the XForms community.

Once again, the Web is changing, and XML is the driving force behind it–I couldn’t be happier.

Post your comments on XForms and XDocs here: