On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Gregg Wonderly <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Well, maybe you don't remember, but microsoft introduced XML as the only > standard that they would be able to support for all other systems in the > world > to communicate with their systems. That was "silliness" at first sight, > but > when everyone decided that they wanted to talk to microsoft software, guess > what? > > this happened > > vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv > > XML is the ONLY standard for exchanging information that is supported by > > everyone. >
Sorry, your history is simply wrong. IBM (lead by Charles Goldfarb) created something called GML - Generalized Markup Language in the 70s (or maybe 80s I'm not sure). Pretty much the same concept as XML except tags started at the start of a line with :foo and ended for :end foo (or something like that; I had the "pleasure" of working with a system done with that when I joined IBM Research in '97 - a system for automatically generating user interfaces from content and style separation [the 1992 Expo in Spain had a huge system built by IBM Research using that stuff]). SGML (late/mid 80s IIRC) was the standardized version of that and introduced DTDs and more. Of course HTML is the most famous markup language created using SGML but its primary success was for complex documentation systems. SGML standardization created a whole host of companies. To the best of my knowledge Microsoft was not involved. XML was an effort lead by Jon Bosak (then at Sun) to reduce the complexity of SGML and make it usable. For example, there was only one full implementation of an SGML parser and a DSSSL engine (parent of XSLT) - by a young brilliant kid named James Clark (later father of XPath and a lot of XSLT). Microsoft joined into the XML party quite late - lead by Jean Paoli, a brilliant guy who'd been doing markup language work for years (and was part of SGML). Europe was the leader in markup work for many years. Microsoft was absolutely the first (big) company that realized the value of XML as a way to model data instead of documents. The original XML working group was lead mostly by document heads, except for the MSFT folks. Even inside MSFT, it was a major uphill battle to convince Bill Gates (then active CTO / chief scientist / visionary) of the potential of XML (is what I heard). Part of the XML vision (lead by the original XML team) was always to simplify not only SGML, but also DSSSL and DTDs. That's what created XSLT and XML Schema in the end. During the XSLT days (which is when I joined - as the data side rep and there was another IBMer for the document side), it was a coup by data-oriented people to make XSLT more friendly for data transformation and not just formatting. That's what lead to to the separation of XSL-T from XSL-FO (Formatting Objects). Microsoft was the clear visionary in that transformation. By the time it came to XML Schema, politics and diversity had set in .. and it became a huge morass because all the query people got in and basically needed all the SQL data stuff in XML Schema so that they could build XQuery later. Anyway, there's lots more to this history but by no means is it that Microsoft defined XML to defend against Java. That is just silly to think so; sorry. There are many reasons why Java is a TERRIBLE way to serialize information models IMO. For example, using the type system - named types don't work anywhere as well as structured or duck typing because of the looser coupling it enables. That right there is a *fatal* flaw. Second RPC and passing around object references?? Um, seriously? I know you're a passionate Java advocate so I'm not going to try to convince you :). However, history is not something you can rewrite. OF COURSE there will be something better than XML and (hopefully WS-*). This time, the improvement will come from creating a solution that addresses XML + XSLT + XPath + XQuery + XML Schema + XML Namespaces + ... all in one piece of technology instead of a design-by-committee morass. It must be good at representing both structured data and documents equally well, map to existing programming languages reasonably well etc.. The only work going on that's that ambitious enough to even attempt to solve such a massive problem right now (that I know of) is Microsoft's M effort. And even that doesn't address the protocol aspects or the challenges of considering security in the core of the data model. I think we're going to need a few more iterations of fundamental concepts before we really have a solid foundation for distributed computing. Hopefully it'll happen in my lifetime :-). Sanjiva. -- Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D. Founder, Director & Chief Scientist; Lanka Software Foundation; http://www.opensource.lk/ Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.; http://www.wso2.com/ Member; Apache Software Foundation; http://www.apache.org/ Visiting Lecturer; University of Moratuwa; http://www.cse.mrt.ac.lk/ Blog: http://sanjiva.weerawarana.org/
