In this outspoken, InfoWorld interview, Tim Bray covers a wide variety of subjects related to XML. Tim Bray, is one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. One of his most notable contributions is The Annotated XML Reference. In this interview he talks about everything XML – webservices, RSS, xml for data interchange, xml document formats etc. Here are a few snippets from the interview.
We thought we were building something that would enable somewhat more efficient publishing of Web pages to multiple devices and so on, and the explosion of creativity and energy around XML has wildly exceeded anything we could have possibly dreamed.
XML and Interoperability:
XML is basically being used everywhere that you have heterogenous computers, that’s to say heterogeneous technology where you’ve got different operating systems or different databases or different anythings, and you need to interchange data, well, XML now seems to be pretty much the de facto way to do that.
XML’s visibility:
So XML is essentially everywhere, but at the same time, it’s more or less invisible because [of] all that’s happening behind the scenes where you don’t see it. I think that the recent interest in XML as an office document format, both in the standardized version of ODF (Open Document Format) and the Microsoft stuff is a harbinger.
XML and RSS:
The world’s most successful XML application right at the moment is RSS. In terms of the volume of data, the number of feeds, and that is a huge source of change, not just on the technology front, but also culturally.
Webservices:
We’re[he is referring to Sun Microsystems] not promising to interoperate with whatever the WS-* castle in the sky is, we’re promising to interoperate with what Microsoft shipped. And we will do that. And I think IBM will too. So the core big picture vendors will actually interoperate with each other.
Blogs Accuracy:
InfoWorld: Of course there’s blogs where you can’t really trust he accuracy of everything that’s out there.
Bray: You know, I hate to say it, but I have read gross inaccuracies in your publication.