Ten Predictions for XML in 2007

An anonymous reader writes "2007 is shaping up to be the most exciting year since the community drove off the XML highway into the Web services swamp half a decade ago. XQuery, Atom, Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), XProc, and GRRDL are all promising new power. Some slightly older technologies like XForms and XSLT are having new life breathed into them. 2007 will be a very good year to work with XML."

My hope..

[gregmac]

..that XML will stop being a buzzword, and we will no longer see products with "XML support" as a feature point (supporting formats that USE XML is fine, but "XML" itself is a container format, it can describe literally ANYTHING..)

Re:XML is broken

[YA_Python_dev]

pick one of the better alternative formats and convert to XML after editing

Well said. A good example is RELAX NG [wikipedia.org]: write the source in the compact syntax [relaxng.org] and convert it to XML when/if you need it.

A simple compact syntax example:

start = element title { text }*

The equivalent XML (and the RELAX NG XML format is considered much better than, e.g., W3C XML Schema):

<grammar xmlns="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0">
_ <start>
_ _ <zeroOrMore>
_ _ _ <element name="title">
_ _ _ _ <text/>
_ _ _ </element>
_ _ </zeroOrMore>
_ </start>
</grammar>

(Please ignore the underscores.)

Remember people: XML may be good for data interchange between different applications because every language ever created by the gods has an XML parser, but don't use it for anything else. To quote Phillip J. Eby [dirtsimple.org]: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use XML." Now they have two problems.

Re:Who else was hoping...

[uradu]

In my experience those who hate it the most are those who understand it the least.

Re:Who else was hoping...

[Wiseman1024]

I'd kill XML in favour of either:

- A standard binary, binary-safe serialization format that allows you to serialize simple objects: int, float, (unicode) string, list of any of these types and dictionary of int, float or string any of these types.

- A real, binary-safe, flexible grammar processing tool that allows you to define grammars in EBNF and process them (preferrably, constructing and deconstructing the parse tree), being standard, clean, and multi-language. This will allow you to work with XML as well as other existing exchange formats (INI, CSV, etc.) and absolutely anything else.