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Things to note (strategic):

None of SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and now WS Security are "Royalty Free".

SOAP isn't a de jure standard -- it's a W3C "note".

UDDI was supposed to move into an open standards body in 2001 but still hasn't.

By publishing WS Security on their websites and through no open standards body we see Microsoft, IBM and that other company abandoning even attempts to appear open.

On the technical side -- if you want to see a little deeper into the security issues left unsolved by SOAP, I recommend you look at the OASIS technical committee specification, ebXML Message Service Specification version 2.0 rev C.

Other points in the article that scream XML to me:

* A key element would be the configuration format description file. This would list the configuration options for a given piece of software, giving for each one the name, type (boolean, list, string, etc.), options, category (for subsections within the config), and help text (short and long).

This looks very much like XML Schema to me - it can specify all these data types, including enumerations, and a schema-aware XML editor (eg XML Spy in the Wondows world - anyone know the best Linux option?) will prompt you with help-lists of valid elements and attributes, or list of enumerated values. Doesn't do help text by default, but has an expansion mechanism (xsd:appinfo) for adding application-specific to be added to a schema.

* It all needs to be language, distribution, and operating system neutral, so as to avoid turning off any potential software developers who might find it useful.

I don't know of any programming language or O/S that doesn't have an XML Parser (many don't yet have XML Schema support, but if you stay off specifying default values you don't need that at run time). And XML is good for natural languages - UTF 8 or UTF 16 from start.

There aren't many formats that are equally machine and human readable, even fewer that allow document struture and data typing, and still fewer that have open or free implementations on practically all platforms.

While I have my issues with XML Schema, it was never intended to replace or compete with something like ANTLR or BNF. The latter were meant to describe an entire language down to the nitty gritty. XML Schema is only intended to describe the format of a document within the confines of well-formed XML syntax.

Might I suggest taking a look at RELAX NG.
It has the much simpler syntax for which you may be looking. But it is still a well-formed XML document and can therefore be parsed with the same tools as the instance documents.

Don't forget that a primary reason XML Schema came to be was that it is a pain in the ass to make both an XML parser and a DTD parser (let alone the validation logic). I've done it. While not as hard as many other things out there, it's made a lot easier with having unified parsing code. And it allows for one schema syntax to be converted to another with an XSL-T stylesheet. Or for conversion to a group of schemas (think one stylesheet for generating the database schema and others to make your programming header files). Need to make some changes? A stylesheet is easier to update than classic source code especially when that source code requires a compiler which may not be handy on the box in question.

And let's not forget documentation! Another stylesheet to convert to XHTML (or whatever).

The Gimp
DSSSL

Both developed in Scheme

One question remains, though: which standard stylesheet should I use for XHTML documents?

Before I commence my rant, let me offer what I do know. In XML documents, stylesheets are never optional. This includes XHTML. I assume the HTML Working Group has documented a set of standard style sheets, but I lack any inclination to research the matter. Judging from the Mozilla IRS XML demo (which also works in IE), there are at least two.

Why am I so indifferent to XHTML? Because it's just not very important. Before XML came along, HTML was the only way to do rich text in a web browser. But now (well, not right now -- neither IE nor Mozilla fully implement CSS or XSL, and we need both) you can use any XML application you want. And there are some very nice ones out there. Docbook is well established and has all the features you could want. (A web-compatible stylesheet would be a pain to write, but I think there will be several available soon enough.) DITA is a very promising XML app for API documents, my own particular interest. Many, many more are currently available or under development. As XML becomes more widely accepted, there will be schemas and stylesheets to suit every interest.

XHTML has to compete with all of these. Even if I had fonder memories of the the HTML Working Group's past efforts, I'd be sceptical that it can. Where's the call for a complex one-size-fits-all XML app?

The HTML Working Group claims that XHTML has two important features. It will work with older browsers that don't support XML, and it will make it easy for HTML hackers to learn XML. But neither claim makes sense. Most older browsers, with their hacked up little features, will just choke on XHTML. And HTML people who can't deal with the paradigm shift are not going to be helped by yet another over-complex spec.

the best solution that the W3 has to offer is HTTP 1.1 and XHTML 4

The stateless, text-oriented, forms-supported model had its day but that day has passed.

If you actually read the W3C website, they agree with you. That's what XML is for, and emerging standards (which Microsoft will try to either ignore or bugger up like they did with Java) such as XUL.

The problem is generally not in the standards. It is with people who bend, extend or ignore the standards.

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DocBook is your friend

DocBook is a lot to digest at one time, but it is well worth the effort. Personally I prefer DocBook XML and use Norm Walsh's XSLT stylesheets to transform the XML to anything I want... HTML, PDF, whatever.

Here are some resources for your reading pleasure.

• OASIS DocBook Site
• Norm Walsh's DocBook Site
• Get Going With DocBook - Mark Galassi
• SGML for Windows NT
• DocBook tools

DocBook is Open Source, freely available on all platforms of interest, can be used for simple documents to complex books, separates presentation from content, and is extensible. What more could you want from a document format?

• DocBook Home Page
• What is DocBook?
• Commercial and free tools that support DocBook -- One of these is Framemaker which you mentioned. This means you can probably convert your existing documents without a lot of trouble.
• DocBook: The Definitive Guide -- a book from O'Reilly and Associates on using DocBook that is also available online for free.

• DocBook Home Page
• What is DocBook?
• Commercial and free tools that support DocBook -- One of these is Framemaker which you mentioned. This means you can probably convert your existing documents without a lot of trouble.
• DocBook: The Definitive Guide -- a book from O'Reilly and Associates on using DocBook that is also available online for free.

• DocBook Home Page
• What is DocBook?
• Commercial and free tools that support DocBook -- One of these is Framemaker which you mentioned. This means you can probably convert your existing documents without a lot of trouble.
• DocBook: The Definitive Guide -- a book from O'Reilly and Associates on using DocBook that is also available online for free.

• DocBook Home Page
• What is DocBook?
• Commercial and free tools that support DocBook -- One of these is Framemaker which you mentioned. This means you can probably convert your existing documents without a lot of trouble.
• DocBook: The Definitive Guide -- a book from O'Reilly and Associates on using DocBook that is also available online for free.

And Sun is a large SOAP supporter.

A large supporter? What do you base this on? The last I checked Sun hasn't done anything noticeable with regards to SOAP.

In fact, the OASIS group just recently rejected SOAP as their transport protocol and I believe Sun is a large supporter of that effort.

They've also announced the early access release of the JAXM API (XML messaging) so I'm wondering where you're getting this "large SOAP supporter" point of view...?

Unfortunately, because of it's TeX heritage, the way LaTeX describes styles and macros is pretty clunky. Underneath the covers, it's more like a machine language, with numbered registers, side-effects, and odd processing hooks. XML/XSL is probably a better choice: it's more formally defined than LaTeX. The XSL transformation model is easier to understand and more predictable to most people.

The biggest problem with XML in my view is cosmetic: it's a pain to type. XSL is somewhat more limited than LaTeX when it comes to specifying physical page layout in a device-independent way, but those limitations probably can be overcome in the long run, and they don't matter that much on the web: for physical layout on the web, XSL has most of what you need.

I think XML and LaTeX are slowly growing together anyway. LaTeX 3 will probably have some built-in XML support. There are already several packages that can go from XML to LaTeX and from LaTeX to XML. In the long run, we may see that LaTeX will become an alternative input syntax for XML and that TeX/LaTeX will be used more and more for producing actual printed representations of XML documents.

You can find lots of related links here.

Not too long ago, Scientific American ran a couple of items like this one citing Xerox, and specifically Mark Stefik on digital rights enforcement. So where's Xerox and their tech in all this?

At the Xerox site I found some references to XRML or DPRL (Digital Property Rights Language) and ContentGuard

More XRML at Oasis-Open like this item by Robin Cover.

But I don't see anything off-hand on doing the MP3 kind of thing. That would involve an extension to autonomous devices. Could be done if the devices had decent hard-to-tamper clocks.

There are other people in the same business such as NetActive

It's still not free, of course. But I'm not yet convinced that copyright is dead. I'm willing to pay for rights, but I need the real rights that I used to get, not some constrained version like SDMI.

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Henry Troup

Not too long ago, Scientific American ran a couple of items like this one citing Xerox, and specifically Mark Stefik on digital rights enforcement. So where's Xerox and their tech in all this?

At the Xerox site I found some references to XRML or DPRL (Digital Property Rights Language) and ContentGuard

More XRML at Oasis-Open like this item by Robin Cover.

But I don't see anything off-hand on doing the MP3 kind of thing. That would involve an extension to autonomous devices. Could be done if the devices had decent hard-to-tamper clocks.

There are other people in the same business such as NetActive

It's still not free, of course. But I'm not yet convinced that copyright is dead. I'm willing to pay for rights, but I need the real rights that I used to get, not some constrained version like SDMI.

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Henry Troup

I took a brief look at DocBook. Looks very nice, but it's by no means a TeX replacement (closer to a LaTeX replacement but without the ability to go really low-level).
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While it's not what you asked for, there is a steady creeping toward co-operation betweeen the two. Sure, it's inconsistant, and I do agree with Miguel's point about the Unix way as a geek defense mechanism. (On the other hand, competition/evolution has quite a few benifits!)

Gnome and KDE programs can easily run under either desktop (duh! :) ). Gnome's .desktop links have been adopted by KDE 2, so some duplication of effort is being removed there. Also, by standardizing on XML DTDs such as DocBook.

There are other ways that Gnome/KDE overlap, but these are becoming ancient history. For example who's going to remember or care about the old KDE 1.x links after a few months of using KDE 2?

I'm usually very sceptical of new buzzword technologies. When I first heard about XML and did a little reasearch I was floored by the elegant simplicity of the model. XML at its most basic is a set of parser(HTML or whatever) tags that allow the representation of structured data. Much like simple HTML tables are constructed of tags like "" tags, XML extend this to define more complex structures.

For instance, a simple dataset containg haircolor,eyecolor and name for a group of people could be represented with tags like .... This idea is not only a boon for people trying to translate complex information across the web but it also allows for greated complexity in documents viewed on the web.

Here's the part where things went Awry. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium is the offical standards organization for the web. Their biggest problem is that as a standards body they are trying to maintain stabilty and conformity of standards. This makes them rather slow at approving and implementing new standards. In the past this resulted in companies like Netscape and Microsoft integrating new technologies into their browsers long before they become new standards. Javascript and ActiveX are just two examples. Can't really blam them, they have to compete in the marketplace and he who gives the consumer what they want soonest usually wins and gets to set the defacto standards. In a nutshell, the W3C has become little more than a R&D organization.

So, then we get to XML. Initially proposed over six years ago it was initially rejected by the W3C. Many outside the W3C like the proposal though so many groups started developing and testig different variations of XML. XML and similar technologies like XSL-Extensible Style Language, SVG Scalable Vector Graphics and and a plethora of others began to appear. See the Oasis to get an idea for how far this has gone.

Today there are so many standards for XML variants that there are actually groups with competing standards for XML formats as specific as data exchange between banks. Kind of like a modern day tower of Babel.

So, to answer your question, yes XML holds a lot of promise for document and data interchangability among different software products, but between here and that goal is one huge civil war among competing groups and technologies. Giants of the software industry like IMB and Microsoft have already staked their grounds. Recent Patent Rules changes and passage of UCITA in several states have complecated matters by allowing companies to patent abstract things like database structure and parsing rules. Hopefully like the war between VHS and Beta a clear winner emerges quickly more importantly the winner must be an open standard.

You beat me to one of the issues: books. He referred to Andrew Carnegie and libraries in the original article. A university is going to need textbooks for classes and a library. While it is all well and good to say that lecturers will do it for recognition and posterity, there is no way to stock a library with an up-to-date, complete collection of relevant material for free. Some items can be obtained that way. An online university could mirror Project Gutenberg. I also heard yesterday that the Oxford English Dictionary is going online and that they are looking for institutions (such as libraries) to subscribe and then provide access to communities. He could make them an offer to pay to put them online for everyone.

Then there is the issue of up-to-date technical references and textbooks. There are going to be people willing to write material for free for a good cause. But making it complete, getting it reviewed for technical accuracy and keeping it up-to-date are a different issue. A good start might be to seek out good material that is already on the net on various subjects and offer the authors a permanent, stable home for it. That alone, with a really good index and search engine could be a fantastic asset.

Another idea that might attract some good free material would be to offer a service like Source Forge to people interested in creating free content. Give them free web space, backups, CVS trees, mailing lists, etc. for the project. Host mirrors for some of the open text formatting tools: (La)TeX, texinfo, DocBook, etc. and encourage authors to use one of them and link to the mirror so that users can download the software they need easily.

And, I second the motion to interview him. Maybe we can help him set the initial direction on some of this by asking some good questions. Whether his free online university succeeds or fails in the end, it is worth the effort. It will help answer the questions about what an online school can offer and what it needs to do to offer it.

To say "We've written the system in XML." is about the equivalent of saying "We've written the system in ASCII and matched the parentheses."

In the vast majority of applications, when people say "XML" they really mean something like RDF, BRML, RELML, etc.

The best use of XML currently is to simply dump existing relational databases to the web and index them with XML-oriented search engines like XSearch for things like RELML.

One of the pit-falls of "XML-oriented search engines" is that they fail to provide basic query capabilities such as numeric comparison on the indexed fields. This is really unnecessary since all they need to do is put the XML data back into a relational database on their end and index appropriately on the numberic fields. If they don't like the schema checking, they can always use LDAP and turn off schema checking.

An example of good use of XML via RELML is at www.nmre.net. Check it out.

Beyond this simple "dump the legacy rows to web pages" approach to E-commerce searching, there are the inferential systems that are more or less the equivalent of inferential databases. In these schemes, rather than storing literal values for the database rows in XML fields, a set of rules of derivation are included along with the XML data fields, and the actually index values that are not explicitly specified are derived prior to indexing. One might think of these as methods derived attributes as opposed to stored attributes. This is the direction Guha et all were trying to take things with RDF, but IMHO, failed to find the "sweet spot" of simplicity and power required for a new standard.

Definitely use XML over HTML. With XML, you can make up your own tag-set that accurately represents the structure of your documents. It would then be trivial for you to write an XSLT (see http://www.w3c.org/TR/xslt) stylesheet to transform your document into HTML (which has very little structure beyond lists and nested 'div' containers) for delivery, complete with auto-generated TOCs, indices, etc.

Then, if you decide to change your HTML style, you can just re-generate it by changing your stylesheet - without touching your content. It's sort of like generating HTML forms out of content in a database.

In terms of internationalization support, XML documents can contain just about any Unicode character. So basically you can write an XML document in practically any language.

Your XML source can capture things like:

12345-67

Whereas in HTML it would be more like:

12345-67, or at best 12345-67

In HTML, the only way to reproduce the 'build-your-own-vocabulary' capability of XML would be to have your whole document be a sea of div> and elements, with their 'class' attribute set to different values. But processing (and reading) such documents would be a real bitch.

A plethora of XML tools are available and tons more are on the way...

I recommend using James Clark's "Xt" (http://www.jclark.com/xml/xt.html) XSLT engine in conjunction with Sun's "Project X" (http://java.sun.com/xml) XML parser.

James was editor of the XSLT spec, and an outstanding programmer. The Sun XML parser has been shown to be the most conformant, and is quite fast.

Both applications are written in Java.

More XML info:

• http://www.oasis-open.org
• http://www.xml.org
• http://www.xml.com

The Docbook DTD and the associated DSSSL which are being extensively used in the open source community still use gif as the default format.

Some more suggestions:
SGML and XML News
Python News
Most of the Unofficial Netscape channels would be good ideas, too.