Pamela Gennusa, Database Publishing Systems Limited, addressed How XML could change the marketplace. From the earliest reports from XML developers, we start to see an emergence of an 80/20 rule. XML developers are citing short development times (Lark took approximately 2-3 weeks, without Unicode support).
It looks like XML may take 20% of the time it takes to implement SGML, but with 80% of the functionality. This could mean that more vendors may be willing to invest in the development of XML products who had previously shied away from SGML product development.
If the vendor currently has SGML products, it will be necessary to add some things (e.g., Unicode, support for Internet protocols, etc.), but most of the differences will be in what is suppressed or removed from the product (inclusion/exclusion exceptions, use of NMTOKEN/NUTOKEN/etc. declared values, etc.).
For a current Web vendor, moving to XML will require a new way of thinking about document structures. The biggest hurdle will probably be the fact that there is no fixed tag set and no fixed style attributed to the tags. More subtly, it will be necessary for such developers to start to rely on the document structure rather than on the file that the HTML document is stored in to identify reasonable chunks. Segmenting documents on element boundaries may be very new territory in many cases. Gennusa then listed the state of the market as she was aware of it at that time.
Gennusa postulated that if XML becomes widely adopted, it will hit the business-to-business market first, not the consumer marketplace, which would be a very slow second. SGML vendors will need to make products more usable, while traditional web vendors will need to move to higher functionality and robustness. While some Web products may go up in price, SGML products will decrease in price. This will be partly due to the increased competition from other XML vendors, but also as a result of an increased user base. If corporate, commercial, and academic publishers, use XML, we will see more of both business-critical and non-business-critical documents migrating toward XML, including documents that were firmly in the domain of word processing and/or HTML. This will mean a more cohesive document-base, greater reuse of office documents, faster, easier dissemination, and some retraining of office personnel.
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