As you read this the holiday season (in both hemispheres) will have long since passed and we will be rushing headlong towards Mardi Gras, Carnival, call it what ever you will. But here, as Bradypus writes, the last minute shopping is being done and the winter solstice is upon us. So he hopes you had a good season and are all prepared for the year to come.
Confirmation, if needed, that XML was ready to go, came on the first day of the SGML/XML'97 Conference in Washington DC when Jon Bosak announced that the draft standard had now gone forward to the W3C as a recommendation. Good news, particularly for online publishers who had to get their development plans for 1998 in place before the end of 1997. By now the vote will be complete and Bradypus expects the recommendation to go through without any major changes.
This being the case we can expect 1998 to be the year of XML at least as far as the computer and publishing industries are concerned. Nor is it too soon for the SGML community to congratulate itself on the bright, beautiful baby it has spawned. And congratulations to those who worked hardest to bring it about - Jon Bosak and his team ... not forgetting the companies, too numerous to mention here, which paid for their time and travel.
.... the job is not yet complete. We still need XML Linking and XML Style. At the conference the editors of the linking standard promised to be ready to go to recommendation in time for the 7th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW7) April 14-18, 1998 in Brisbane, Australia. That's excellent news because, although XML Linking will only be optional for XML compliance for browsers, we all know it will be essential for the success of XML.
With the style standard all is not as clear. The draft proposed by Berglund, Clark, Paoli et al looks like a good starting point but a lot of work still has to be done. It's good that it supports CSS so the code we write now will not be obsolete this time next year. Nonetheless a lot more input is needed from the style gurus out there if the standard is to be strong enough for high quality publishing on the Web and on paper. There are a lot of people out there with strong views as the White Space thread started by Neil Bradley in xml-dev in the autumn proved. So why not get involved and let the XSL authors have your views?
By the way, Bradypus really hates 'XLL' and 'XSL' as names. He's also heard others complain. If you share his view, why not write in to the W3C with some (witty even) suggestions?
In the last issue Bradypus commented on the difficulty of selling public domain items and ISO standards to corporate bosses. He was worried that take up of XML would be slow because the tools would be at first mainly from the PD camp. Well he is encouraged by the enthusiasm shown so far on the part of the mainstream vendors. Here is a sample of corporate announcements over a one week period in December:
Now all we need is for IBM to reveal its hand. After all, as far as Bradypus knows, IBM still sells more software than Microsoft! And what about Netscape? Well, maybe that's a story for next time ...
Hanging about in the rafters, Bradypus overheard some interesting conversations at SGML/XML'97 and one in particular remains in his memory. During a discussion on editing tools over lunch there was some criticism of their high cost. After a while a small voice chipped in predicting that the real impact of XML would be a sudden and steep fall in the price of editors during 1998. Interestingly, she thought that this would not come from the existing vendors of SGML editors, but rather from one or two of the sellers of cheap HTML editors who would leverage their product to support XML, including parsing, in Q1 of 1998. Could happen and we may soon see a few $150-$200 SGML (i.e. XML) parsing editor. Bradypus is prepared to forecast that should it happen these will become the market leaders in all but CALS editing shops.
It was sad to hear that Grif SA is having financial difficulties. Bradypus has been critical of Grif for its failure to develop its SGML/HTML family of editors at a fast enough pace, in fact little seems to have been done since Jean Paoli left the company. But loss of competition in the editor marketplace cannot be good for the SGML community and so let us hope that there is a white knight riding to the rescue. Let's also hope that a significant R&D budget is part of the rescue package.
Here are a few lines plucked from the air at SGML/XML'97: "SGML is an unnatural act. XML is also an unnatural act, only faster." Doc Goldfarb; "Style is the Achilles Heel of XML." William Y. Arms; "I never meta-DTD I didn't like!" Doc Goldfarb again.
Contact Robin Cover with corrections and updates, or to submit contributions to the ISUG online document database.
