Fwd: What Is XML, or MicroXML?

Hi folks,

It's been a while, and I'm sorry for the scarcity. For one thing I've been
almost surprised to find my once grubby, candle-lit sideline writing and
critiquing poetry blossoming into a full-on secondary career. But MicroXML
does deserve what time I can scrape together for it, and recent XML-DEV
threads have convinced me of that even more.

Anyway, I thought this I've forwarded might be apropos.

--Uche


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Uche Ogbuji <uche@ogbuji.net>
Date: Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 10:04 AM
Subject: What Is XML, or MicroXML?
To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
Cc: "xml-dev@lists.xml.org" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>wrote:

> On 11/17/13 10:38 AM, David Lee wrote:
>
>> This is a good idea.  I've wondered for a while when the next phase
>> transition would come along - first SGML -> XML, then XML -> ????.
>>
>
> I see some good hints in MicroXML and FtanML in particular, but it's
> probably time or past it.  I don't think there will be quite the same
> uptake. XML benefited simply from saying "these things are actually
> possible" at a time when that was still a surprise.
>

Simon, you won't be surprised to hear it, but for the benefit of others I
do want to clarify that I *hope* MicroXML never has anything near the same
uptake as XML.

XML was way too popular for its own good. I myself came to XML after a
brief sojourn in SGML because i had recognized that the traditional data
formats I was dealing with were hopeless in representing the
semi-structured data that's all over the customer and consumer relations
area (my domain specialization in the mid-90s). I immediately warmed to the
document-centric approach. I heard a lot of folks saying "hey this stuff is
great for data as well" and I didn't know enough to demur, so I shrugged
and went along with that. It wasn't very long *at all* before I realized
using XML for "pure data" was a bad, bad idea. It wasn't just the mess made
in the likes of WDDX and XML-RPC, or the XML-as-CSV I was seeing crop up as
the latest form of bloatware everywhere, but it was the fundamental
realization that XML has been essentially optimized around natural language
(character data) with a modest layer of annotations suitable for natural
language, which is collectively text. Almost anything else was using a
hammer to fasten in screws. Folks here on XML-DEV were very helpful in
making clear details of this realization.

When Simon and co went off to create Common Core and SML, when Simon put a
lot of work into seeing how ASN.1 could be better appreciated by the
hammer-wielders, when PaulT painstakingly catalogued the alternatives to
XML, especially for programming and DBMS, when XAML started to make waves,
and when JSON eventually took off, many of us were cheering because we saw
it as a way XML could be saved from the personality split of doc-heads
versus data-heads. Instead we got Namespaces, PSVI, XDM etc. In a way data
appeared to have colonized XML, but the planet was never really right for
data, no matter how assiduous the terraforming.

MicroXML is pretty much just back to minding the XML 1.0 knitting, but with
even fewer temptations for the hammer-wielding colonizers (e.g. we
considered just ignoring XML Namespaces structured and decided in the end
it was better to make it impossible to even write anything that looks like
XML Namespaces). That means that we'll never have the sorts of participants
who are so adept at pushing a technology up the Gartner Hype Cycle, and
that's quite fine by me.

If some of the folks in recent threads instead want to have some XML-like
all-singing, all-dancing axioms-all-the-way-down structured data
representation system, I have no interest whatsoever in stopping them. I
just won't accept their calling that system XML, because it's not. MicroXML
is much, much closer to what XML really is, and yet we know better than to
call it XML.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                       http://uche.ogbuji.net
Founding Partner, Zepheira                  http://zepheira.com
Author, Ndewo, Colorado                     http://uche.ogbuji.net/ndewo/
Founding editor, Kin Poetry Journal      http://wearekin.org
Editor & Contributor, TNB
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/author/uogbuji/
http://copia.ogbuji.net    http://www.linkedin.com/in/ucheogbuji
http://twitter.com/uogbuji



-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                       http://uche.ogbuji.net
Founding Partner, Zepheira                  http://zepheira.com
Author, Ndewo, Colorado                     http://uche.ogbuji.net/ndewo/
Founding editor, Kin Poetry Journal      http://wearekin.org
Editor & Contributor, TNB
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/author/uogbuji/
http://copia.ogbuji.net    http://www.linkedin.com/in/ucheogbuji
http://twitter.com/uogbuji