Re: Off-Topic: Question about closing of W3C XML Working Groups

Hi Andreas,

You raised issues around both XProc and XML in general. Although both 
are somehow related, please don’t equate or confound them.

On 12/11/2017 13:00, Andreas Mixich wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> a little bit off-topic, so, sorry on that, but I know, that some core
> XML people are on this list, who have been involved in one or more
> charters/working-groups and thus I would like to ask, what all that
> 
>      Note: The XML Processing Model Working Group was closed in 2016.
> 
> on pages like the /XML Core Working Group Public Page/ and /XML
> Processing Model Working Group/ page mean.

The “XML Processing Model Working Group” is the XProc working group. All 
working groups have a charter where its goals are written down and the 
date by which the goals must be reached. After failing to get an XProc 
2.0 spec out when the XProc WG mandate ended last year, the W3C 
published an intermediate draft as a WG note. Some volunteers picked it 
up from there and are now working on what they called XProc 3.0. The 
volunteers operate as a W3C community group [2], one of the most 
important effects of this being that all contributions be made under the 
W3C patent policy [3]. The actual spec work is maintained in a Github 
repository [4], and there are meetings (Amsterdam 2016-09, Prague 
2017-02, London 2017-06, Aachen 2017-09, Prague 2018-02) with an 
attendance of 12–16 people. You don’t have to be a member of the 
Community Group to attend, although the hurdle to become a member is 
very low.

The XML core group’s charter seems to have expired, but like the XProc 
charter’s expiry, it doesn’t keep people from using XML. XML-related 
specifications continue to be written and used at different 
standardization bodies. You mentioned OASIS where, among other things, 
DocBook XML is maintained. A notable recent activity is the 
standardization of NISO STS [5], a JATS derivate for specifying the 
markup of standards documents.

XML is strong in publishing, from legal to STEM to fiction, and in the 
Digital Humanities. Although the TEI folks are trying to specify their 
content models independent from an XML serialization, the (actively 
maintained) TEI P5 guidelines are mostly describing customization 
mechanisms for XML schemas and documents.

Many publishers need to produce and consume more “webby” formats such as 
the HTML serialization of HTML5 or JSON. With a probable replacement of 
the XML-based EPUB format with something that is purely based on HTML5 
and JSON [6], this requirement will become more important.

In order to build a bridge between the largely XML-based content 
repositories of publishers and the Web-based publication formats, XPath 
3.1 and the specifications that use it, namely XQuery 3.1 and XSLT 3.0, 
are able to convert between JSON and XML and to serialize (non-XML) HTML 
according to the HTML5 spec [7]. On the other hand, tools such as 
validator.nu expose HTML5 documents in different tree models that can be 
read by XML processors.

> 
> I am aware of the damaged state of XML, especially on the Web (HTML5,
> JSON, etc.), but has XML lost its authoritative decisions body? Or are
> these things now being done over at OASIS?

I wouldn’t call it damaged, although it certainly lost popularity. We 
see less XML hype than, for example, in 1999 where all kinds of software 
touted to be XML-based even when only their name-value configuration 
file was in XML syntax. I don’t want to recount the XHTML 2.0 history 
here, but XML and its proponents have been viewed as overhyped or 
arrogant by some. They did things differently; for example, in the HTML5 
spec and in other WHATWG specs there are minutely detailed procedural 
specs for data formats (HTML itself, URLs, etc.), where XML formats tend 
to be defined in a more declarative fashion. We also see overuse of JSON 
for documents where XML is certainly more fit. When all hype cycles are 
over, I’m confindent that XML (but also JSON, and probably also 
CommonMark) will emerge as a survivor.

> 
> Is there some clarifying article/blog post, I could learn more about the
> current state of affairs? One of the worst things, that could happen to
> XML, would be, if, having become a niche-product, organizations would
> start implementing and extending “in-house”, fragmenting what never
> ought to become fragmented.

There are certain initiatives, for example MicroXML [8], to cut away 
things from XML that many people consider ill-designed, such as 
namespaces. I’m a die-hard XML namespace proponent, but I’m certainly in 
the minority [9].

I don’t think that anything that has XML or X in its name will attract 
new users. The X has become so unpopular even in the enterprise space 
that a company whose flagship product is based on XQuery denies this 
legacy by claiming to offer an enterprise NoSQL database [10].

XProc, in its 3.0 version, will probably remain most popular in 
publishing where XML and XML-based formats continue to be important.

In June, I started writing an article “The State of XProc in 2017.” I 
hope to finish it when it’s still 2017. It will be published on xml.com.

Gerrit


[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/xproc20/
[2] https://www.w3.org/community/xproc-next/
[3] https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/
[4] https://github.com/xproc/3.0-specification
[5] http://niso-sts.org/
[6] https://www.w3.org/TR/pwp/
[7] https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#syntax
[8] https://www.xml.com/articles/2017/06/03/simplifying-xml-microxml/
[9] https://twitter.com/gimsieke/status/432250945473241089
[10] http://www.marklogic.com/

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Received on Monday, 13 November 2017 07:56:38 UTC