Trip report from XML 2003

The opening plenary session featured a keynote by Jon Udell of InfoWorld. I enjoy his columns (and have enjoyed his weblog when from time to time I remember to take a while to read weblogs), so it was no great surprise that I enjoyed his talk.

XML, he started out by saying, is changing the way organizations do business. But is it changing the way that people in those organizations do their work? Can we separate those two questions so easily?

The key idea of XML, he continued, is that database data and documents are made of the same underlying ‘XML stuff’. Because that is so, it seems likely to become feasible to allow users to navigate, without visible application seams, through all of the data they have an interest in. Because XML makes it easier to retain information about the (original) context of the information, the information experience can be richer. He quoted Brown and Duguid, The Social Life of Documents (which looks to be worth reading), and recalled to our mind a couple of old marketing efforts about seamless information spaces, both the old Microsoft slogan about the ‘universal canvas’ and the old Apple Knowledge Navigatore video. (He also quoted Tim Bray and Jean Paoli and Jon Bosak and others, perhaps as a way to establish that he does have his ear to the ground and listens to the right people.)

As examples of how XML and standards and off the shelf components can help bring these old slogans to life, he showed a simple tool he built for searching arbitrary XML, demonstrating its use to search the document containing his slides (“Is the talk too quote-y? How many slides actually contain quotes, and from whom?”).

As one might expect, he was mostly positive about the integration of XML into Office 2003, but he thought Microsoft had seriously dropped the ball on one thing: email, he said, remains the primary lubricant of our business processes, but Outlook is the one Office application where users can't create or use XML data.

He suggested that the Draconian error handling of XML 1.0 (ill-formed data must not be let past) might be setting too high a standard; it's amazing to watch highly paid professionals spending what would otherwise be billable time trying to make their data well-formed. The XML parser is there to prevent incursions by the barbarians, he said. But what we really need are not ways to keep the barbarians out but ways to allow them to become useful, productive citizens.

As an example, he talked about hearing someone (Ray Ozzie) complaining about the difficulty of exchanging calendar information, and about giving an example to show how it could be done. His data was, accidentally, ill formed. But the browser was able to make some sense of it, which Udell counted a bit of a victory. If we can squint and make it well formed, then we can make it more useful.

He didn't persuade me that Draconian error handling is a bad idea: its purpose is not in fact to keep barbarians out but to prevent the spread of tag salad, which has historically been the gray goo of the non-XML Web. And so far, I am inclined to think it a success. He did persuade me that tools like Tidy, which can do the squinting for us and help civilize the barbarians, are a good idea; he just didn't persuade me that they should be built into the XML infrastructure.

In a way I didn't quite understand, he suggested that XML's strictness may be responsible for the shortcomings of our editing technology. A long time ago, off the shelf HTML composers were at 80% of the required functionality (as Jon Udell sees it). They still are. They haven't moved forward.

Meanwhile, we have lots of things for XML authoring. But they are all focused on structured, well designed stuff. (In retrospect, I think he means they are all focused on XML that doesn't have mixed content or support natural document structures — true for many, but I think “all” is stretching it a bit.) They don't appeal much to people, because as Jean Paoli has said (and in my opinion this quotation was worth going to the conference for), “someone who puts in a penny of effort on structure or data cleanup expects a penny of result in return.”

In conclusion, he suggested, we don't need to wait for Microsoft to deliver Cairo. We have the raw ingredients now and we can move forward in a more inclusive way, by using the combination of XHTML, CSS, and XPath. CSS in particular is a great opportunity for smuggling metadata into documents: Let's build packages of style tags that make things look good. And then build tools that do useful things with them. And then people will put metadata into their documents just so they can use our stylesheets.

With these tools, we can get serious about using XML to capture real-world context. In this endeavor, XML's publishing DNA (he means mixed content again) is a great asset. Let's not just bring XML Web Services to the desktop, let's put them on it. Because the pipelines are XML, we can inject intermediaries who observe and who capture a lot of context from what they observe. (At this point, to my surprise, he did not quote Yogi Berra's dictum “You can observe a lot just by watching”. But it was a good peroration anyway.)

After the opening plenary, I was somewhat less studious in taking notes of talks, so I can't summarize the other talks I heard in anything like the same level of detail.[1] There were also many, many talks I wanted to attend that I didn't make it to owing to scheduling conflicts. (I felt like asking my own audiences what they were doing in this room, instead of listening to the great talks going on next door and down the hall.)

W3C had a booth, and I enjoyed hanging around while the exhibits were open. After the presentation of the XML Cup on Wednesday, we displayed it at the booth, which gave me the pleasant feeling that my teammates were proud of me.

Among the demos at the booth I saw and liked was one by David Ezell of the National Association of Convenience Stores (and the XML Schema Working Group), who demonstrated how he can (a) extract XML-encoded transaction logs and summaries from a point-of-sale device using the built-in Web server, (b) massage them a bit with standard XML tools, and (c) dump them into Excel so that the accountants and business analysts can work with the data.

Network Inference was showing an OWL-based inference engine at our booth, which was simultaneously exciting and depressing: it looks very cool, and it means I am going to have to learn OWL after all.

I also saw a demo of Infopath from Microsoft, which seems to be fairly slick software. I wish it supported open standards instead of being poised to compete with them, but leaving that aside I have to say the software itself looked pretty cool.

Other booths were also showing some interesting stuff. Ontopia's topic-map tools continue to look good, and I took a quiet moment to go to their booth and look at an extended demo of them. I keep telling them they should be W3C members; I hope they mean it when they say they are thinking about it.

A small German startup called Infinity Loop was showing an interesting pair of tools. Like many other tools, they focus on the task of getting XML out of Word (and back into Word), but they take a different approach. Instead of providing an inevitably complicated tool for defining mappings between Word and an arbitrary target vocabulary, they expect the movement of data from Word to the target vocabulary to be a two-step (or n-step) process. Their translator studies the layout of the Word document and produces XML in one fixed vocabulary which captures a more or less generic logical structure, with style information captured and placed in separate CSS stylesheets. To get from their vocabulary to the target one, the user will use XSLT or another tool of the user's choice. The result is a little less obviously appealing than some mapping tools, but the reasoning seems sound to me: mapping tools are notoriously difficult to use, because the problem is so complex. The division of labor implicit in the Infinity Loop product means the key step of the process is done using standard tools for XML-to-XML transformation (i.e. the tools programmers are going to spending a lot of time with, anyway) rather than with a specialized conversion tool. Since I don't do a lot of conversion work, my opinion on this may be misguided. But I find the clarity of approach here attractive.

Along the way, other things also happened: I heard thought-provoking talks from Jacek Ambrosiak, Adam Bosworth, and Matthew Fuchs (among others) which I haven't tried to characterize above. And along the way, the XML 2003 Program Committee awarded me (along with Adam Bosworth) the XML Cup, which was welcome recognition of the way I've spent my time over the last few years. The work thus recognized, however, is by no means mine alone: it is the common effort of members of W3C working groups and interest groups inside and outside the XML Activity, of implementors, of users, and of many others. It is to their work that the success of XML must be attributed, and it was on their behalf that I accepted the award.

And, since in large part the readers of this piece will be those who have contributed, in one way or another, to the success of XML, I can close this by saying to you directly, dear reader, Thank you very much.