XLink - where are we? [tiny amount of frustration]

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 03:07 11/11/98 -0500, Ralph Ferris wrote:
>
>Apparently, my announcement of HyBrick 0.8 on this list - and several
>others - has been completely overlooked by yourself and the other people
>holding this discussion. HyBrick 0.8 is a working implementation of

No - I was aware of the work that you and others have been doing. And many
thanks for it. I was also aware that there is a reconstituted (==
revitalised??) XLink-WG. 

What sparked me off was the implication - real or not - that XLink might
undergo yet another redraft/latency period. And also - unless I'm out of
touch - the absence of documents to work with. 

We have a vicious circle here which we have to try and break:
	- no authoring tools ==> no documents
	- no documents ==> no XML-aware tools
	- no XML-aware tools ==> no real *interoperable* applications
	- no applications ==> no drive for authoring tools

My concern is that there are a small number of us - including yourselves -
that are tackling small parts of the problem. We need ways of bringing this
together. SAX, Xschema, various companies, and others including myself have
offered code as OpenSource - this helps. But we don't have critical mass.

**In particular we are not exploring interoperability**. By this I mean
that person A sends a document to person B in a different organisation and
B tries to work with the document. Not easy. But that's what our real aim
is, surely? [Documents can, of course include data and other things like
molecules, music, vector graphics, etc.] Until we do that we aren't
exploring and innovating in XML. We are simply looking at ways of passing
pseudo-paper over the wire. As I have bemoaned before, virtually no-one is
yet passing XML over the wire.

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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