Technical Plenaryhttp://norman.walsh.name/2005/03/04/techplen 8 36 2005-03-04T11:46:48-05:00 $Date$ Norman Walsh 2005 Norman Walsh A week at Logan airport talking web architecture and XML. #banner { background-image: url("images/boston-banner.jpg"); color: white; } #banner a { color: white; border-bottom: 1px dotted white; } #search { color: white; } The annual W3C Technical Plenary is a whole heapin' helping of technology chatter. It's an all-day, all-technical affair sandwiched in between four days of working group meetings. Per usual, I was booked for the whole week, double booked for part of the week, and triple booked once or twice. After Steve Bratt ’s introduction, the plenary itself got busy with extensibility and versioning. In a great panel, introduced spectacularly by Paul Downey , we got a peek at just how many facets that problem has. In summary Apologies for the W3C member-only link. , it's about “effective management of change”, “inheritance”, “don't procrastinate”, “identifiers”, “agreements are valuable”, “partial understanding”, and “compatibility”. At least. My own contribution to the plenary day was participation in a panel on the future of XML. I mumbled something along these lines:
XML is widely deployed; the cost of change is enormous. It would seem that the benefits of a change would have to be equally enormous to justify the effort. My crystal ball has always been pretty poor, but it seems to me there are four possible directions we could take: Editorial revision: shuffle XML, XML Namespaces, Infoset, XML Base, xml:id, XInclude, and maybe a few other things together into a more coherent set of specifications that describe exactly the same language. Party like it's 1997: knowing now what we didn't know then, refactor things, blunt some of the sharper edges, fix a few obvious problems, but develop essentially the same technology. Armed revolution: design a new system that solves all of the problems that XML is now being used to solve, but do it better. The future is now: continue extending XML to solve new problems (binary, update, etc.) as best we can.
In retrospect, what I think I didn't say is what direction I think we might actually be able to pursue. To be blunt, editorial revision would be an interesting intellectual exercise but it'd be vastly, horribly, unbearably tedious to get it all right; I don't think the return on investment warrants trying to make the small-to-medium fixes that I've described in the past, much as I wish we could go back to 1997 and do them; I'm one of the old guard, revolution may be the answer, but I'm afraid I'm more likely to be up against the wall than leading the charge; and that means we just have to muddle along as best we can. And that's what I think we probably have to do. I found the panel a bit depressing, actually. Especially when Jonathan Marsh capped it off by suggesting that maybe what we really ought to do is rescind XML 1.1. My spirits were buoyed somewhat by Richard Ishida ’s lightning talk, “XML For Everyone?” Richard described new work being done to develop XML. Drawing from hundreds of languages that require XML 1.1, he gave a whole bunch of concrete examples. When he postulated that the “X” in XML might come to mean “excluded” without the adoption of XML 1.1, he got cheers from the audience. Long, loud, and widespread cheers from one end of the audience to the other. Maybe this XML thing will work out.