Comments on: Does XML have a future on the Web?

By: Bob Buffone

Bob Buffone — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:12:31 +0000

XML is one area that we will see more of in the upcoming year. Ajax has been the hottest topic in Web development, and as such JavaScript and JSON has dominated the conversation. XML is used by many Commercial Ajax products to define screens, event handling and data binding. This will creep more into the broad Ajax and web market. People complain that the W3C is irrelevant but people need to look into more of whats been created and adopt it XML is one such areas. XML Events is a good place to start. It could be added to all browsers by creating an Ajax Toolkit that uses this to do late binding of events. XForms is another thing that could be adopted by Ajax toolkits as a way to create screens that would be standards complaint….

By: cmsmcq

cmsmcq — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:15:36 +0000

Dave, yes, you are quite right. And the wide use of RSS and Atom is surely one reason for Doug Crockford’s analysis that XML is now too widespread in the infrastructure to go away again very soon. I haven’t found the documentation of RSS and Atom terrifically helpful in understanding the vocabularies, and perhaps for that reason they have not yet become my favorite applications of XML. But it’s clear that many others have found the vocabularies perfectly serviceable, and some of my colleagues do their best to make me feel old-fashioned when I describe trying to understand a vocabulary by looking at the documentation.

She, you may be right. The quick answer to your closing question, of course, is “well, I am.” And the reason is simple: the way in which we represent our information can make a big difference in how well we can use it. This isn’t a new insight: in The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks expounded the maxim “Representation is the essence of programming.” And one of Niklaus Wirth’s books bears the suggestive title: Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. And speaking for myself, I spend a lot more time with the data I care about than with any one of the algorithms I use to work with it. Your mileage, of course, may vary, and there is no reason at all that everyone in the world should have to find the same things interesting, in the year 2008 or at any other time.

Happy New Year!

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 19:13:12 +0000

Actually there is good XML support in JavaScript, namely EAX; it just isn’t standardized yet, and probably won’t be until EcmaScript 5. And before 5, we have to pass the hurdle of 4….

By: she

she — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 14:47:47 +0000

“Any language that can accumulate so many different enemies, with such widely different complaints, must be doing something right. Long life to descriptive markup! Long life to XML!”

I think this is a bit too easy. I was using PHP for a long time until i switched to ruby. I am soon using ruby since 4 years (i still keep php around, for a few legacy reasons, and to not lose the “touch” to it, but aside from this as far as I am concerned, php is dead).

In this regard, XML is something i dont really like. It may be used a lot but when I have a choice I will try to opt for something easier (for me), and if need be I auto-generate the XML and not bother about it anymore.

So in this regard, for me, it more becomes a database-exchange language. And thus, something incredibly boring too - i mean, who really is INTERESTED in XML in the year 2008 anyway?

By: dave

dave — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 13:43:38 +0000

What about RSS? Doesn’t RSS use “XML” and “the web”?

By: cmsmcq

cmsmcq — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 01:38:40 +0000

Thank you for the kind words.

Yes, the initial plan was to get the blog up set up, with an initial post or two, and then perform some complex magic with proxies and permissions to make it Team-only. But the URI became known before that magic was done, and it seemed like a bad idea to make it Team-only.

So I changed the plan, and the blog is public, with no plans to ‘take it private’.

By: Jacek

Jacek — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 22:05:58 +0000

Hi MSM, I was led to your klog a few days ago and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I share your conviction that XML has future and a good and useful one, too; and I share the nervousness about other notations, in particular JSON; but then, I guess expecting a good native XML support in languages like JavaScript was a bit too optimistic or naive. I’m reminded of the relative failure of XOP (XML-binary optimized packaging, http://w3.org/TR/xop10 ) to catch any attention, as a somewhat similar kind of situation. Oh, and then there’s RDF…

Anyway, commenting mostly to say hi and to add a remark (as Norm already did) that in your first post, you said your klog would be team-only and yet it seems to be public. Not that I wish you to hide it!