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I know a lot of us here are surprised that XML 2.0 hasn't happened. Most of the people I know who've looked closely at the XML family of standards are aware that there are serious problems in the specs, though which pieces are the problem is one of those never-ending conversations. This past year has been a return to markup for me. Not that I ever really left, but I haven't worked in the code mines for a while. I'm using web technology - HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - to build mobile applications. You can get a sense at: http://htmlref.labs.oreilly.com/ We started with DocBook - everything at O'Reilly is DocBook. I needed to get to HTML5, so out came the XSLT (1.0). Yes, of course there's been some JSON in there, actually generated with XQuery I was happy someone else was willing to write. As I move forward on related projects, I'm pulling out XLink and XPointer again, applying them to HTML5 through the wonders of JavaScript. There's been virtually no angst over which pieces of XML mattered. XML syntax has been a constant in the markup, but apart from the original DocBook DTDs schemas haven't mattered, and namespaces barely figured in. The core of the project has been ever-evolving markup constructs that we'll reuse in a largely unconstrained way. I know the XML world emerged from a standards-centric universe, but that approach has provided us with mixed results. We had a burst of creativity through committees that worked in some ways and failed in others. "SGML on the Web" was completely a failure, at least as originally articulated, and while XML syntax for HTML remains a common best practice, the revolt against that syntax has many adherents driving current standards. Instead of wondering about which direction the standards could, should, or will go next, let's take this pile of parts and do more interesting things with them. In the Web context, JavaScript has become powerful enough that we can begin to extend the browsers ourselves and implement functionality we've craved for years. There are lots of good parts here, but I don't see the critical mass needed to do to XML what XML itself did to SGML. In the meantime, there's plenty of good work we can without endless committees. Thanks, -- Simon St.Laurent http://simonstl.com/
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