RE: Fragmentation of document formats on the Web

For every SVG, there will be a DataGraphicXML.  For every 
X3D, there will be a 3DIF.  The social and economic forces 
are stronger than the technical forces.  The IP profits alone 
are worth busting the myth of standards convergence.

The lifecycle of XML languages will be determined by their 
composability with other languages under the different 
programming frameworks.   Natural languages never converge 
even if they have common features and members.

Language fragmentation is a natural event.

len


From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]

I wouldn't say that this was the point of XML.  IMO, it's simply to have
an interchangeable markup syntax, which is just what we've got.  Nothing
about that precludes further innovation "on top" of XML to address the
scalability issues of, well, a proliferation of XML document formats.
8-)

IMO, RDF/XML is such an innovation (and more generally, RDF itself), so
I think the W3C has that part of the problem covered.  But obviously
David's paper discusses the more general problem.

Received on Thursday, 13 May 2004 18:04:34 UTC