Re: Off-Topic: Question about closing of W3C XML Working Groups

Andreas Mixich <mixich.andreas@gmail.com> writes:
> I am aware of the damaged state of XML, especially on the Web (HTML5,
> JSON, etc.), but has XML lost its authoritative decisions body?

I don’t think there’s anything damaged about the state of XML. It’s
not seriously threatened by HTML5 or JSON or anything else for the
kinds of problems I’m interested in: mostly prose documents written
largely by human beings for consumption by other human beings and/or
machines.

The fact that I’m now constrained by circumstances to deal with JSON
for mostly-data APIs is a minor inconvenience. JSON is just like XML,
really, if you ignore most of the useful features of XML.

HTML5 isn’t really about markup anymore, an inflamatory observation, I
know. It’s part of the application development platform for the web.
It’s probably good enough for that, I guess. And web components means
it’ll have something that resembles XML, with less rigor and no
mechanism for avoiding name collisions. But I’m sure that’ll never be
a problem.

> Or are these things now being done over at OASIS?

Some of them are being done at OASIS. If you invent a new XML
vocabulary and you think it needs to be standardized, OASIS is a
perfectly fine place to do that.

The core XML specs were defined at W3C so that’s where some of the
core language extensions (stylesheets, query, linking, pipelines) got
defined.

However, standards organizations live and die by what their members
are willing to fund. When XML stopped being exciting, and could be
viewed as largely “finished”, member interest waned. If you’ve got
limited staff and limited resources, as the W3C does, you have to
apply them to the problems that the membership is interested in
funding.

Consequently, the XML activity at W3C has wound down. And it’s
important to note that membership interest isn’t limited (or perhaps
even principally) about member $$$. The working groups dwindled as
well. Companies stopped participating; they have limited budgets as
well. It became harder and harder to achieve quorum at Working Group
meetings or maintain sufficient membership to actually accomplish
anything.

Before we abandoned our attempts to standardize the next version of
XProc as a W3C Working Group, we were down to about four or five
members in the working group; that’s just not enough. And we were all
complete volunteers with no direct support from our employers.

If you want more XML standardization, you have to participate and/or
lobby for your employers to participate.

> Is there some clarifying article/blog post, I could learn more about the
> current state of affairs? One of the worst things, that could happen to
> XML, would be, if, having become a niche-product, organizations would
> start implementing and extending “in-house”, fragmenting what never
> ought to become fragmented.

Maybe that will happen. If it does, and if the fragments start to
catch on, there may be interoperability problems. And maybe, just
maybe, that will eventually generate sufficient interest to reopen the
question of standardization. At that point, someone will invent “the
next standard thing.” It won’t be XML. Whether it’s a useful successor
is something we’ll just have to wait and see.

It’s also important to put this all in historical context. In the
mid-1990’s when work on XML started, there wasn’t ubiquitous high
speed internet. There wasn’t github. There wasn’t npm. Companies
didn’t routinely build products with a tower of random dependencies
slurped down from the internet. (I just peeked at a project I’m
involved in, even de-duped, there are more than *a thousand* dependent
modules; and it’s a reasonably small, utterly straightforward web
application.)

If we invented XML today, would it need to be standardized? Or would
it just need to be an NPM module?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh
Principal Engineer
MarkLogic Corporation
Phone: +1 512 761 6676
www.marklogic.com