Seems to be what’s next for XML time again!
As far as I remember working with XML, people have been discussing what was next for XML…
Back in 1999 -yes, that was last century!- when XML was only one year old there have been SML, announced on XML-DEV, developed on SML-DEV, forked into YAML which can be seen as a superset of JSON.
SML inspired Simon St.Laurent who published in 2000 the specification of a profile of XML called Common XML.
Refactoring suggestions blossomed again in late 2004 and I felt the need to write why I thought this was a bad idea.
The discussions went over and over and in 2008, Norman Walsh explained why he thought that was a bad idea.
At some point, I lost interest in such discussions and was awakened by James Clark’s MicroXML suggestion in December last year.
For Norman Walsh, the trigger appears to have been the MicroXML poster at XML Prague and he has answered with his own suggestions « XML v.next » as soon as he’s been back home from the conference.
These new proposals are cool and very tempting, but I don’t see what’s different from all those we’ve seen in the past and still think such efforts are very unlikely to succeed.
I feel comforted in this judgment by the feeling I had in XML Prague that the XML community has lost faith in the idea of « XML as new lingua franca for the Web »: in this context, these efforts look like desperate attempts to reshape an old technology so that it looks sexy again!
Does that mean that I see no future for XML?
In his first post about MicroXML, James Clark distinguishes three kind of works on XML (XML 2.0, XML.next and MicroXML).
XML.next (« something that is intended to be a more functional replacement for XML, but is not designed to be compatible
« ) seems to be both more interesting and more likely to happen to me.
James Clark also says:
XML.next is a big project, because it needs to tackle not just XML but the whole XML stack. It is not something that can be designed by a committee from nothing; there would need to be one or more solid implementations that could serve as a basis for standardization. Also given the lack of compatibility, the design will have to be really compelling to get traction. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I will leave them for another post.
Last time he made this kind of promises, he was speaking of a better schema language and came with TREX, an ancestor of RELAX NG.
I am really curious and excited to see what he has in mind for replacing XML!