XML 2003 wrap-up
Filed in: XML2003, Sat, Dec 13 2003 02:11 PT
I’m always exhausted after conferences. This one is no exception. It’s a charge to the creative part of my brain, a change of scenery, the shock of rapid-fire human interaction. The chance to dream of cool new stuff. XML gave me all of that, and yet, I feel like something’s hiding.
It feels to me not like the air has been let out, as I’ve seen in other conference circles, but that the business side has taken over. And I can see the toll that can take on the real visionaries in the XML world, the folks who got us where we are today. Clearly, the idealists behind this standard are paying the bills (most of them, at least). But, as Adam Bosworth said in his keynote, there were the visionaries who had the vision, and sold the companies on it so they could get their way. It feels like they’re all looking for a way to sell them on the good stuff again.
There are a lot of topics with some buzz around them. Topic maps, for example. RDF and Semantic Web applications had a few followers. XQuery and XForms are catching on. And there are some things, like Web Services, that have crossed the threshold into the domain of business. There are still border skirmishes around SOAP versus REST, and so on, but the upshot of it all is that servers and clients are talking XML to each other, which gives the idealists one more thing to be happy about.
I have to say, I want to figure out what I’m going to be demanding in ten years, and my impression is that XML is only going to be the glue for that. (It’s also my hardcore geek media fantasy, so I won’t bother with any great detail.) There will be something for the idealists to cling to, coming soon, and it’s not that quick pop you’ll get out of Atom, for example. It’s got to be something big, something that captivates the user. Microsoft, at least, knows that. It’s going to be up to the rest of the world to realize that and act in the user’s interest. I could go another several pages railing against current user experiences, and so on, but I’ll leave that for another day. For now, it’s another six hours on a plane, another hour in the car, another brass ring, another dream.
