Report from XML 2001!

This year's major North American XML Conference, XML 2001, was held at the Dolphin Hotel, Orlando, Florida from December 11-15. Despite the slow down in business travel following September 11, the conference was well attended. This year's theme was XML, What Works! The conference focused on what people are doing with XML today, as well as highlighting new areas of interest.

	The Chair for XML 2001 was Lauren Wood, Softquad. Her planning committee included C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, W3C, Jon Bosak, Sun Microsystems, and Marion Elledge, IDEAlliance. Keynotes included Lauren Wood, James Clark from the Thai Open Source Software Center, David Reed, Microsoft Corporation, and Larry Cable, iPlanet.
	Jane Harnad, IDEAlliance staff, discusses membership in IDEAlliance at the booth on the Exposition floor.
	A delegate to XML 2001 enjoys a bit of Orlando sun during the afternoon break.

Wood provided the opening keynote. She then introduced the keynote presentation by James Clark. Clark is known in the SGML/XML community for his leadership in standards development and open source software contributions including SGML and XML parsing engines.

Clark's keynote provided a number of challenges to the XML community. While Clark was deeply involved in the development of XML 1.0 and XSLT he has recently become an increasingly dissenting voice at the World Wide Web Consortium. In his keynote, Clark outlined his concerns about the position in which the W3C and the greater XML community now find themselves.

Five concerns were outlined by Clark in his keynote:

Making Progress While Keeping XML Simple: According to Clark, one of the major strengths of XML is its simplicity. XML 1.0 avoids forcing information into a single category. Clark sees a trend to integrate vendor, domain-specific interests into the general XML infrastructure. He believes such features need to be implemented on top of the general infrastructure, rather than being lumped in with general-purpose functionality. Clark sighted the XML Schema work of the W3C as an example of poor layering and making XML much more complex at the infrastructure layer than need be.
Don't Neglect the Foundations: Clark told the audience that today so much more depends on XML than was imagined by its creators. Also one of the key features of XML's design was SGML compatibility. Clark challenges the XML community to enhance the XML foundations and disregard their early promise for SGML compatibility. Clark believes the XML community should strengthen the foundation of XML, and proclaimed that we "should be free to stab the SGML community, what's left of it, in the back."
Controlling the Processing Pipeline: Clark believes the major omission from the core XML standards is the ability to associate processing with an XML document. Such processing includes, but is not limited to, parsing, validation, XInclude processing, and XSLT processing.
Improving XML Processing: Clark believes that the current APIs for XML (SAX and DOM) make processing XML too difficult or too error-prone. This is complicated by the fact that Namespace support was "grafted on" and that both interfaces are not aligned with XML Infoset. Clark challenges the XML community to re-examine XML processing and consider other approaches such as data-binding.
Avoiding Premature Standardization: Clark concluded by warning XMLers to avoid making everything a standard. Standards certainly have great benefit in areas that are well understood. However, Clark notes that standardizing an approach too early can stifle innovation. In some sense standards can be anti-competitive and often prevent better ideas from surfacing.