Regulating the XML Marketplace

[Gabe Beged-Dov]

>At 11:20 AM 1/8/99 -0500, Mark Baker wrote:
>>The true value of XML, IMHO, is in its potential to become ubiquitous.
>
>Precisely.  The ability for a thousand different applications to share
>identical plumbing is a significant step forward, not something to be
>sniffed at by jaded experts.
>
>This isn't just for the bean counters - XML means that people can finally
>start sharing data without everyone needing to have precisely the same set
>of tools.  Sharing a format like this can reduce costs across the board,
>not to mention aggravation.


I want to focus on what I see is the key one for XML. XML as an interchange
format, and the various XDK (XML development kits),  __potentially__ lower
the barrier to entry of application development. This is especially true if
the application is part of a deployment environment that is made up of
loosely coupled applications.

One critical requirement for XML and XDK is that they be good framework
citizens. This means supporting both layered architectures and peer
architectures. As Simon has mentioned in several postings, there are some
significant problems with the current crop of XML specifications and XDK
offerrings in the area of layering and peer functionality.

An example of layering problems are the coupling of well-formedness and
validation in both the specs and the tools. An example of peer problems is
the multiple ways to point at something (entity, XPointer, idref).

All of these problems are addressable by creating monolithic specs and XDK
that dictate a certain configuration of layering and peer services. At some
point though, this catches up with you.

This was one of the main reasons I created XArc (www.jfinity.com/xarc). I
thought there should be a simple low level linking construct on top of which
higher level services like XLink and RDF were layered.  But I guess that
would be too easy :-)

Gabe Beged-Dov



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