XML: Old whines in new battles

Some side-effects of XML

However, along with death and taxes there is a third certainty in life, and that is if you want to use a new technology while it’s still new, you have to learn it, usually from scratch. There aren’t a lot of books on XML out yet, but the number is growing (half a dozen at the last count). These are high quality books, although most are pretty technical. Remember how things were when the Web was still new? Pointy brackets and plain-text editors and having to learn why <H2> made more sense than <BIG><B>? Now when a new Web user wants to write that first home page, product announcement, or golf club news-sheet, there are graphical page-design packages to help with the layout, and Web-based validation services to test it all against various browsers.

The learning curve is here again: people who have been creating Web pages without really ever seeing much of raw HTML markup will need to come to terms with the stuff in pointy brackets if they want to get in on the ground floor of XML. This time around, the apparent drawback (there is no predefined HTML to help you) is the actual benefit (XML lets you roll your own markup).

Things ought to be a bit different on the software front, too. Long before the pixels were dry on the draft XML spec, there was XML software being developed and XML documents were being written. Almost a year before the final spec was published, there was a suite of XML files to test against, and even a full XML application (CML) complete with a browser (JUMBO). Right now we’re armpit-deep in software for the technology which underlies XML: every first-year computer science student is writing an XML parser in Java; every industry, trade, or business association has someone writing at least one application (the list on the SGML/XML Web pages grows almost daily); most of the major SGML vendors have XML-compliant versions of their products; and there are some wonderfully good public domain software toolsets. What’s still missing is some of the glue to hold the bits together, and the end-user software.