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Hi Rick I think some venting and ranting is productive. I also think Xml and Xml with namespaces is pretty damn good. And the fact that it has not changed fundamentally much for 10 years suggests it has strength. Xml does have a challenge in spanning the data centric to document centric spectrum. Layered Xml technologies built on top are in general impressive: - WSDL, webservices - Xml Schema - XSLT - XPATH/XQuery - DOM - XInclude/XLink I know that all of these layered technologies have problems. But taken as a family they are formidable and very usable. Yes, HTML has big mind share, but the way forward right now for HTML is to go towards XML where the tools, technical mind share and general synergy is. Perhaps Xml could be re-invented. Perhaps some of the great ideas that I am sure exist in SGML could be brought in - yet again in a different form. Yes, SGML is an influencing technology and deserves to continue to be known by those who propose data formats. My comment is, the young person on the street/developers are learning Xml, not SGML. And for them, learning all of Xml and its layered technologies is quite alot. For those planning the future, however, an understanding of the past is in order. I am unlikely to do that primary research into SGML, but am happy to hear from those who have as to what is the value of SGML in this ongoing debate. -----Original Message----- From: rjelliffe@a... [mailto:rjelliffe@a...] Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 11:22 PM To: 'XML Developers List' Subject: Re: Do namespaces address all use cases well > But how well they address all use cases I do not know. I would be > interested to hear about use cases where Xml namespaces fail and rough > sketches of better technologies. <rant>Namespaces are another example of how comprehensively W3C has messed up XML. Just as HTML stagnated for a decade, so XML has stagnated. RDF still cannot play with XML (RDFa, which could work, isn't defined over XML.) XSD is as far from being straightforward to use or implement as is technically possible, and there are no plans to improve it except by adding more bits.</rant> We are now at the stage where we have the third or fourth generation of major XML vocabularies, and we have no way to declare the relationship between vocabularies, or that one vocabulary is a subset or superset or dialect of another. (I don't see that SKOS is enough.) This is really hurting the ODF and OOXML efforts, and indeed you can see the same thing with HTML: the only answer they have to all these dialects is to make more! <rant>These problems exist because there are no vocabularies to describe the relationships, and IMHO there are no vocabularies because of a basic blindspot at W3C, for all its other strengths. I think this is that the W3C views the Web as a set of links and resources rather than a publishing platform: they cannot see the wood for the trees; the effect is that publishing kinds of issues such as maintainability get sloughed off as an issue for private enterprise: I don't think quality (in the industrial sense) is much on their radar actually. </rant> So actually I welcome attempts to develop XML & HTML in interesting and useful directions: go for it! <rant>I have long thought there should have been a more HTML-ish dialect of XML and even implemented this in some products (ECS). But I hope they don't deny that the needs for a forgiving syntax for casual data is matched by the need for a stricter syntax for mission-critical data. And I hope they will start to treat this as an engineering problem, not a market research problem. Of course, the answer from the protocol people will be to put the namespaces in the HTTP headers. Just as the answer for HTML people will be to put it in the html/head section. And as the answer for XML people was to annotate the elements directly. The fruit does not fall far from the tree, so people will try to make things fit neatly: XML people should no more be telling HTML or protocol people where to stick their namespaces than those people should be telling XML people. There needs to be the basic respect of other people's use cases: plurality. (And I will try to be amused by the number of people saying "XML needs to get away from SGML" who have no actual knowledge of SGML. When James Clark said it, he had a good idea of what he was talking about. And he has come full circle to be interested in variant syntaxes with DSL recently anyway.)</rant> Cheers Rick Jelliffe _______________________________________________________________________ XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS to support XML implementation and development. To minimize spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@l... subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l... List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
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