Re: Scope of W3C recommendations; core issue for polyglot & DRM

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
> On 1/28/13 6:30 PM, Karl Dubost wrote:
>>
>> Kingsley,
>>
>> Le 28 janv. 2013 à 14:07, Kingsley Idehen a écrit :
>>>
>>> Put differently, XML usage and relevance (at broad Web-scale) is on the
>>> decline.
>>
>> I have seen that sentence a few times. I have no idea how we backup this
>> by real data on a timeline. Do you have hints? Or how do you evaluate it
>> yourself?
>>
> For the "Web Developer" profile, all you have to do it look at places like
> Github and other Open Source collectives. The trend is away from XML to
> JSON.

XML and JSON serve different use cases. XML is subpar for data
structures but superior for structured and marked-up documents. JSON
is subpar for documents but far superior for data structures (except
for missing lots of useful type constructors like tuple product...).
That lots of people decided to use XML for protocols and data is
unfortunate and has been a major contributor to its poor reputation
among typical web devs.

Do you have evidence that XML is in decline for document processing
workflows in favor of JSON?

As far as I know, there is no standard technology with XML's features
and deployed base. Are there other generic, extensible document
mark-up languages out there?

> BTW -- I use XML extensively and appreciate its utility for data
> transformation and exchange, the problem is that it needs to succeed or fail
> on its own merits. Squeezing it into HTML will never help XML survive or
> succeed.

What squeezing is necessary? HTML has a syntactic subset which is
well-formed XML.

You make the assertion that XML *ought* "to succeed or fail on its own
merits". One of XML's merits is being close in syntax to HTML (enough
so that polyglot actually exists).

What normative principle leads you to the conclusion that suppressing
XML-HTML compatibility Recommendations is letting XML "succeed or fail
on its own merits"?

It seems to me, if you want to see XML succeed or fail, you shouldn't
assume it has failed and then condemn it to failure by restricting
compatibility information.

David

Received on Tuesday, 29 January 2013 02:53:01 UTC