Thinking XML: The XML decade
Thoughts on IBM Systems Journal's retrospective of XML at ten years (or so)
Uche Ogbuji(uche@ogbuji.net), Principal Consultant, Fourthought Inc.
14 Nov 2006
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think38.html
IBM Systems Journal recently published an issue dedicated to XML's 10th anniversary. It is
primarily a collection of interesting papers for XML application techniques, but some of its
articles offer general discussion of the technical, economic and even cultural effects of XML.
There is a lot in these papers to draw from in thinking about why XML has been successful, and
what it would take for XML to continue its success. This article expands on some of these topics
that are especially relevant to readers of this column.
XML is approaching 10 years old. How closely depends on how you're counting. The W3C
Recommendation Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 was published on 10 February 1998.
Work on XML started around 1996, however, rooted in almost thirty years of SGML. The design
principles for XML, which guided its development were published on 25 August 1996. The first
working draft, published on 14 November 1996 defined documents very similar to the majority of
XML you might see today. Many of the changes between that first draft and the final
recommendation were in more obscure areas of the standard. The basic idea of labeled, balanced,
hierarchical tags and clearly defined text encoding were well in place in 1996, and so IBM
Systems Journal accounts 2006 the year of XML's decade. Regardless of whether you agree with
their counting, it is a volume well worth a thorough read by all XML professionals as it combines
an interesting retrospective of XML with some useful articles discussing specific techniques and
development, providing a glimpse into the future of the technology, and thus our profession. In
this article I offer some comment and expansion on the treatment in IBM Systems Journal,
focusing on the keynote article "Technical context and cultural consequences of XML" and one of
the other contained papers, "Emerging patterns in the use of XML for information modeling in
vertical industries". The latter paper is concerned with a common theme of Thinking XML--the
development and adoption of industry-specific XML vocabularies.
Avoiding the doom of history
Santayana's old adage "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." has
a corollary in technology: "those who forget how a wheel was invented are doomed to reinvent it."
In order to learn how to extract maximum value from XML it's important to understand at least the
basics of its motivations and guiding principles. One of the most important of these is mentioned
eveline佟2015-01-19有用，之前写东西参考了的
