Clark's commentary

In http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/12/19/jjc.html , Edd Dumbill reports
on James Clark's keynote address at XML 2001 in Orlando.

ED wrote: "Various applications, required by software vendors and
others, need more infrastructure in order to make progress. The key
point, according to Clark, was that vendors' interests are often
domain-specific and need to be implemented on top of the general
infrastructure, rather than being lumped in with general-purpose
functionality."

I strongly associate infrastructure with architecture.  So really, he's
talking about this list's topic.

My notes:


Clark proclaimed that we "should be free to stab the SGML
community, what's left of it, in the back.", claiming that SGML
compatibility is now of much lesser importance.   This seems like a
highly dubious claim - what constraints does the SGML influences
inflict upon us?

Clark recommended that XML Namespaces and Infoset be merged into the
XML core spec, and DTDs be supplanted. Architecturally, is this an
improvement, or no?

Is routing XML documents for processing /that/ big a deal?  Don't
systems already know what to do with their XML docs?

Received on Thursday, 3 January 2002 16:13:24 UTC