How does XML measure up?
Published: 24 Sep 2003 14:05 BST
The XML standard is partly meant to set the grounds for the free interchange of data. Are you concerned about companies piling proprietary stuff on top of the standard?
Anybody who's reasonable has to have concerns about that. It's obviously in the interest of a vendor that has substantial market share to achieve customer lock-in. XML does make it qualitatively harder to achieve customer lock-in, because it comes with a predisposition towards openness. It makes it harder technologically, and it also comes with social expectations. If you publish an XML format, and it's proprietary gibberish, you're going to catch some heat -- from the press, from analysts, from customers. So I think it just makes it harder for a company like Microsoft to achieve lock-in.
To the extent that I've looked the (XML) formats for Office 2003 -- I can deal with them. They're not simple, but then, Word isn't a simple product. But if need be, I could write a script to process a Word XML file and extract the text of all paragraphs with certain references -- which would have been a very daunting task with previous editions of Word.
So, yeah, there's room for concern. As an industry, we have to be vigilant to preserve open access to our own data. But we are moving in the right direction.
Are the successful companies going to be the ones that find the magic balance between true XML interoperability and putting in enough of their own secret sauce to give them a business advantage?
Absolutely. If you bring an application to market and wave the XML banner, what that means to me is that you're willing to accept input in XML, and you'll give me back information in XML, without stealing any of it. What you do inside your own application is none of my concern. All I care about is: does it produce the business value I want?
At my company, we take in XML, and we provide XML output. But inside, there's no XML at all; it's all highly proprietary data structures. That's where the real strength of XML is -- at the periphery, at the interchange.
You've made some comments about XML being too hard for developers. Does that still hold true?
I wrote an essay about XML being too hard to program. I put a lot of thought into that. I was careful about what I wrote, and I stand by every word of it. The business value of XML is plenty high -- high enough to certainly justify its deployment. The progress in making it easy for programmers to use it, to generate it -- that progress hasn't been as good as I would have liked. When I personally write applications that consume or export XML, it seems to me like more work than it really ought to be to do it.
Having said that, in terms of interoperability and openness and attractiveness in the marketplace, it's more than worthwhile. The answer is better software, and we're getting that. In particular, the XML handling class in .Net is a substantial step forward from what's been available before in terms of the amount of work required to get the job done. I think XML itself, in terms of an open, interoperable and internationalised data format, was a pretty substantial lurch forward. So it shouldn't be surprising that the actual tools are going to take a while to catch up. And that's happening. I'm actually quite pleased by the progress.
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