Re: Second International Symposium on Invisible XML

Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com> writes:
> I fully understand why we have sensitivities around the "XML" acronym: I have my own.

For the record, I don’t.

> But I don't think there is a way around them. Putting 'XML' or 'iXML' defiantly into the title doesn't make anyone feel better about anything: it only brings unnecessary debates to the forefront.

I’m very confused by this whole thread. I’ve been persuaded that it might be good to move iXML into a subtitle. I don’t actually think that’s better than putting it in the title, but I don’t think it’s an awful idea.

Taking the sequence of characters “x”, “m”, “l” out of the title altogether is an awful idea. That’s what *it is*.

I’m not going to say that putting XML or iXML in the title makes me feel better, because you’re going to have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands to remove it. It’d damned sure make me feel worse to remove it altogether.

What’s more, we’ve seen this movie before, and I think we all mostly like how the fourth act is progressing. XPath 1.0, XSLT 1.0, & company, were all very firmly, exclusively, undeniable anchored in XML only (or so very close to only that it makes little difference).

In 2.x and 3.x, new features were added that allowed people to explore the possibility of using those technologies with non-XML data formats. And it was great. And successful. And popular.

In 4.0, we’re working on fundamental design changes in the core of the language to fully support queries over maps and arrays (it’s actually still more than JSON, but JSON is a wholly proper subset) and recursive descent processing of those structures.

(No serious proposal has been made to remove “X” from the titles of those specifications; I have heard it discussed, I’m sure there are people who think that we should, but no serious proposal to do so has been advanced.)

I can imagine a future for Invisible XML that follows a similar trajectory. And I think it will require a similar amount of hard work. I don’t think there’s a path from the current iXML specification to a specification that’s more than trivially about something other than XML without a thorough, substantial, and wholistic rewrite. I stand ready and eager to participate, should we decide to do it.

> I would rather stop fighting those old battles, and talk about the fabulous technologies and initiatives, whatever names their creators give them.

Could we begin by ending whatever this skirmish we’re having in this thread?

I’ve been proudly championing XML since previous millenium. I plan to continue to do so. It might eventually have a worthy successor, but if that’s not before the next millenium, I won’t be all *that* surprised.

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh
Saxonica

Received on Wednesday, 19 August 2026 16:23:59 UTC