Celebrate the XML Decade

IdaAshley writes "IBM Systems Journal recently published an issue dedicated to XML's 10th anniversary. Take a look at XML application techniques, and general discussion of the technical, economic and even cultural effects of XML. Learn why XML has been successful, and what it would take for XML to continue its success."

Comments

No mention of XML's creators?

[elving]

Strange that an article celebrating XML's anniversary would neglect to mention XML's creator. I wonder if the fact he works for a competitor has anything to do with it...

Re:No mention of XML's creators?

[tbray]

I have to do this once per year or so, here's the 2006 iteration: I am not XML's inventor. There were 150 people in the debating society and 11 people in the voting cabal and 3 co-editors of the spec. Of the core group, I (a) was the loudest mouth, (b) was independent so I didn't have to get PR clearance to talk, and (c) don't mind marketing work.
-Tim

Re:Why XML was successful

[MP3Chuck]

"IMO a C-like syntax using nested {}s would've been better."

JSON?

Re:XML Decade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that would be 1040 -- 'X' (10) before 'M' (1000) = 990 + 'L' (50) = 1040

Re:Why XML was successful

[Ankh]

> The error message does not help people all that much

One case where it helps most is when an incorrect start tag was applied; with the empty end tag this could not be detected, and it turned out to be more comman than one might expect. You're right that the error messages often aren't good, but did you ever try debugging a large SGML document with OMITTAG and SHORTREF in use? The error message was almost always "characters found after end of document" because the required strategy by SGML (in one of the most common error situations) was to close elements until you got a match, so the parser typically closed elements all the way up the tree to the document element, and then gave up.

We were bound, at the time, to strict SGML compatibility; perhaps if we had known XML would succeed we could have made more changes, but then we would have strayed further from the well-trodden path of implementation experience.

As to comments for attributes, I agree with you; we lost them, though because we needed a language simple enough it could be processed e.g. with Perl. We didn't dare dream that Perl would support XML natively!

I agree with you that structured tools should generally be used. The redundancy and simplicity help computer-generated XML, and help to detect, say, missing portions of documents. If xml-rpc is scary, s-expr rpc is even scarier! :-)

Liam