“Thinking XML: The XML decade”
Subtitle: Thoughts on IBM Systems Journal's retrospective of XML at ten years (or so)
Synopsis: 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.
In this article I touch on points from what the XML community can learn from the COBOL boom of the 90s, to why it's dangerous to use XML as a basis for traditional application modeling systems. It's a bit of a gestalt approach to analyzing some of the key issues facing XML technology at this milestone, and what it might take to ensure XML is still relevant and valuable after another decade. And by that I mean valuable in itself, and not just as a legacy format with valuable data.