XML in 2006 A review of notable happenings in the world of XML this past year
16 Jan 2007
Join Elliotte Rusty Harold for a look back at the most significant XML news from 2006.
2006 was a steady and productive, if not especially exciting, year for XML. There weren't any game-changing products or standards, just slow, incremental improvements to existing technology. Increasingly, XML faded into the infrastructure, usually meriting about as much concern and thought as the paint on the wall. Nonetheless, progress continued, even if no one shouted about it. The browser wars rekindled as Microsoft® returned to the field for the first time in half a decade, and office software started seeing real competition for the first time in twice that long. Atom, XForms, and XQuery all made significant progress by the end of the year by taking a lot of small steps each month. Several interesting new technologies saw the first light of day, including Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) and XProc; and more than one independent developer filled a niche the big boys had missed.
January
The XML community usually goes into hibernation around December 24 each year. There's a big push to get everything out before people break for the holidays, and then a long lull. The first hint of spring came toward the end of January when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XQuery working group finally posted the first working draft of the XQuery Update Facility and associated use cases.
XQuery has been a "next year" technology for at least four or five years. 2006 was no exception: XQuery still didn't arrive in force or even get to a finished specification. However, one reason it hasn't been broadly adopted yet is that it's a half measure. In traditional database terms, XQuery is SELECT without INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE. Vendors had to implement these necessary features with proprietary extensions; and proprietary extensions tend to limit user interest. XQuery Update Facility may be the missing piece of the XQuery puzzle. It was updated twice more during the year, but it hasn't yet reached last call or been implemented by most vendors. Check back this time next year to see where XQuery has gone.
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February
Microsoft launched its latest offensive in the ongoing browser wars with the first public beta of Windows® Internet Explorer® 7. Community reaction was largely positive, although perhaps a little underwhelmed. Most neutral observers seemed to feel that Internet Explorer 7 was a major leap forward compared to the half-decade-old Internet Explorer 6. However, it didn't offer any surprising new features, and it hadn't yet caught up to Firefox. Support for Web standards -- including Extensible Markup Language (XML), Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) -- was improved but not yet perfect. Numerous small flaws were noted and duly reported. Sadly, almost none of them were fixed before the final release in October. Web developers once again cried in frustration at the need to continue coding for browser-specific idiosyncrasies and to limit their use of CSS. Most made promises to move as many of their clients, friends, and family to Firefox as soon as possible.
February also saw Planamesa Software release NeoOffice/J 1.2, the first mostly usable version of OpenOffice for the Mac. Shockingly, it didn't run on Intel Macs, despite being written in the Java™ language. Despite two bug-fix releases and several betas of version 2.0, it never inspired the Mac-faithful to throw away their copies of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel®.
However, the most important characteristic of this release was that although version 1.2 was based on OpenOffice 1.1 code, it supported the OpenDocument format from OpenOffice 2.0. Normal Mac users (people who've never heard of X-Windows, much less installed it) could now open, read, edit, and print OpenDocument files for the first time. This was a big step on OpenDocument's road from paper standard to actual standard.
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March
In March, the Mozilla Project fired back at Microsoft with the first alpha of Firefox 2.0, code named "Bon Echo." Firefox 2 surprised mostly with its lack of new features. Compared with major innovations like tabbed browsing in previous releases, this alpha didn't look much different. In fact, it felt more like a 1.6 than a 2.0. It certainly wasn't as big a change as the upgrade from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7. (Then again, Firefox hadn't stood still for five years like Internet Explorer.) There were little user interface changes like a close button on each tab, and back-end improvements like a SQLite data storage layer for bookmarks and history. XML-wise, the browser was much the same, although Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support did improve slightly.
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April
Browser software wasn't the only front in the conflict between Microsoft and the open source community. If Internet Explorer had a near monopoly on browsers this millennium, office software has been a Microsoft fiefdom for at least twice as long. Although adoption was slow, the open sourcers continued to merge their forces. In April, the KDE Project released KOffice 1.5, a Linux®-based office suite including the usual word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation programs. Notable in this release, however, was that KOffice replaced its traditional formats with the XML-based OASIS OpenDocument file format.
Meanwhile, as the WYSIWYG titans battled it out, one significant release from the semantic markup aficionados went almost unnoticed. After years of glacial progress at best, the Apache XML project released FOP 0.92, an open source XSL-FO to PDF converter. A decent free product for converting XSL-FO to delivery formats like PDF has been needed for a long time. The lack of one has severely hindered XSL-FO adoption and uptake. FOP 0.92 is still not a full implementation of XSL-FO 1.0. However, the old 0.20.5 architecture proved to be a dead end and could not be extended to full spec compliance. 0.92 marked the debut of a new layout architecture that offered the hope of a really solid implementation. Sadly, the FOP project remains starved of resources. Major commitments of time or dollars are needed to push FOP forward to 1.0.
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May
In May, XML eyes turn toward Amsterdam for the annual XTech conference, one of the three big XML gatherings of the year and the biggest one in Europe. However, in the last couple of years it's morphed into a more Web-focused conference. This year, that was true more than ever. Topics included such non-XML technical subjects as Ruby on Rails and JavaScript and even non-technical subjects such as privacy and launching a startup.
Numerous other XML conferences folded even before 2006. It's getting harder to interest people in hearing about XML. Although a few of us live and breathe markup, for most developers it's just an ancillary tool, not the core of what they do. XML lives in a no-man's land between the Turing complete languages of the programmers and the WYSIWYG editors of the humanities scholars. It's a relatively small community that's willing to take XML on its own terms.
Also in May, the International Standards Organization (ISO) formally ratified the OpenDocument file format based on zipped XML as an official international standard. There are as many different definitions of "standard" as there are standards bodies (and there are a lot of standards bodies), but ISO is generally accepted as the most authoritative. ISO standardization carries an especially large weight with governments. The vote was 31 in favor, none opposed.
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June
In June, one of the smallest players in the browser space made one of the most significant releases. Opera Software released version 9 of its namesake browser, and amidst all the usual features it finally added support for XSL Transformations (XSLT). Opera has always been a stronghold of CSS and resisted the XSLT siren call longer than anyone, even Microsoft. With Opera 9, it finally became possible to realize the XML dream of publishing raw XML directly on the Web, with only a stylesheet to say how it should look. Semanticists everywhere rejoiced.
Of course, there's still a lot of ugly, tag-soup HTML on the Web that isn't even valid HTML, much less well-formed XML; and most of it won't be turned into XHTML or XML any time soon, if ever. It would be nice if that morass could be processed with something a little more reliable than regular expressions. This summer, John Cowan made that possible by releasing TagSoup 1.0, an open source parser for the HTML we actually have, not the XHTML we want. Cowan describes TagSoup as:
A SAX-compliant parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild: poor, nasty and brutish, though quite often far from short. TagSoup is designed for people who have to process this stuff using some semblance of a rational application design. By providing a SAX interface, it allows standard XML tools to be applied to even the worst HTML. TagSoup also includes a command-line processor that reads HTML files and can generate either clean HTML or well-formed XML that is a close approximation to XHTML.
TagSoup gets my vote for product of the year.
Also notable in June was the official ISO ratification of Schematron as an international standard: specifically, "ISO/IEC 19757 - DSDL Document Schema Definition Languages; Part 3 Rule-based validation - Schematron." Schematron is a radically different approach to validation based on XPath rules rather than a prescriptive grammar. This separates it from essentially every other schema language for XML and complements them.
Schematron schemas can be as rigorous or loose as you like. In Schematron, anything not forbidden is permitted. The rigidity of traditional schema languages like Document Type Definitions (DTDs), W3C Schemas, and RELAX NG causes fragility. Schematron enables you to define flexible schemas that bend rather than break in the presence of unexpected content.
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July
July saw the publication of RFC 4627, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced "Jason"). JSON was the sleeper hit of the year, precisely because it wasn't XML. JSON is a JavaScript native form for serializing arrays and structs. A lot of JavaScript hackers looked at JSON and decided the X in Ajax (which is supposed to stand for XML) wasn't that important, anyway. They didn't really care about mixed content, attributes, language independence, or other useful characteristics of XML -- they wanted to send data structures from the server to the client. Being able to do this by directly eval()ing the JSON code instead of firing up a full XML parser was an added plus.
Flame wars ignited on various mailing lists, blogs, and Web sites, with JSON alternately praised as the messiah and pilloried as the antichrist (and everything in between). The fires are still burning, but a consensus seems to be emerging somewhere in the middle. JSON's a nice, simple, easy format for nice, simple, easy problems; and there are a lot of such problems. In particular, JSON works really, really well when a server needs to send lists and maps of ints, doubles, and strings to a JavaScript program loaded from the same server. However, for more complex data that doesn't fit easily into a few simple types and a couple of basic data structures, JSON starts to a look a lot like XML, only with parentheses instead of angle brackets. Finally, if you need to transfer data between decoupled systems that don't necessarily know about each other in advance, then JSON is prohibitively (although perhaps not incurably) insecure. There's a good reason XML is defined as data rather than code.
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August
In August, XML geeks dust off their French textbooks and head to Montreal for the annual Extreme Markup Languages conference. This is by far the geekiest of the three major XML shows each year. There are no classes about how to write stylesheets or schemas. Instead topics include subjects like "Higher-order functional programming with XSLT 2.0 and FXSL" and "Is an XML document a FRBR Manifestation or a FRBR Expression?" The conference is always a lot of fun. It's sometimes hard to tell who's serious and who's not. (Sometimes I'm convinced even the speakers aren't sure.) I think the flavor of the conference is well captured in this abstract from Martin Bryan of CSW Informatics for his polemic, "DSRL - Bringing revolution to XML workers":
It's time Extremists revolted against what a plethora of standards bodies are trying to impose on what was originally promoted as a way for users to control how their documents should be processed. Today everybody from W3C to the UN is telling us what names we should use to mark up our information. Why should we have to use their overly-complex schemas, their stupidly-long element names, their cryptic entity names, or their simply-stupid schema declaration language structures? Extremists need to take back control of what they call things in their own information space. Now the ultimate standards body, the International Organization for Standardization, has come to the rescue of Extremists and introduced DiSRuLe (ISO/IEC 19757:8 Document Schema Renaming Language - DSRL), a simple language that will allow you to take control of your markup language while still being able to pay lip service to customers who insist on believing what other standards bodies tell them.
DSRL is a serious proposal under development at the ISO, in the same working group that standardized RELAX NG and Schematron. In some ways, it's a simplified version of architectural forms, a means of using a vocabulary that makes sense to you while still exchanging standardized documents with other people and organizations.
Later that month, the W3C published the fourth edition of XML 1.0 and the second editions of XML 1.1, Namespaces 1.0, and Namespaces 1.1. These incorporated assorted errata. The most significant change was putting the xmlns prefix in a namespace. The W3C likes to pretend they always meant to do this, but that's not true. The original namespaces specification was clear and unambiguous that the xmlns prefix didn't have a namespace URI. Only after the Document Object Model (DOM) decided to ignore the spec did the XML Core group introduce an erratum to rewrite history and pretend xmlns had always been identified by a namespace. Nowadays, some tools (like DOM) treat xmlns as identifying the http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/ namespace, and some tools (like SAX) don't.
In another important release from the W3C, the XML Query Working Group and the XSL Working Group released the XML Query Test Suite (XQTS). This is one of the most complete test suites to ever come out of a W3C working group. It certainly beats the old approach of releasing a spec and then having a third party write the test suite several years later (a practice pioneered by the XSLT 1.0 working group). The test suite isn't directly relevant to most XQuery end users. However it's quite relevant to the quality and interoperability of their tools. The suite has already enabled vendors to find and fix numerous bugs in their products. Two products have now passed 100% of the tests at the minimal conformance level (as well as implementing various optional features). Several others are over 99%.
Finally, the Unicode Consortium released Unicode 5.0 with 1,369 new characters for Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Kannada, Latin, math, phonetic extensions, and symbols. It also encoded five scripts for the first time: Balinese, N’Ko, Phags-pa, Phoenician, and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform. It's getting harder to find a script that Unicode doesn't cover. (Klingon, anyone?)
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September
OK, I lied. Opera wasn't quite the last browser to add XSLT support. In September, the Omni Group released OmniWeb 5.5, a $29.95 payware Web browser for the Mac. Version 5.5 added support for XSLT for the first time. OmniWeb is pretty far down on the list of most-used browsers, generally hovering somewhere in the noise under 1%. However, every little bit helps.
Also in September, Wolfgang Meier simultaneously released both eXist 1.0 and 1.1. eXist is the major open source native XML database. The two versions differ in internal details like the indexing system, optimizer, and storage engine. eXist supports XQuery and XUpdate, although the XQuery implementation, at least, is imperfect. eXist isn't ready to replace expensive, big-iron XML databases like Mark Logic or DB 2 9; but for small jobs, it might be adequate. If nothing else, eXist should help developers become comfortable with XQuery on the cheap, much as MySQL and PostgreSQL reduced the cost of entry for learning SQL.
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October
In October, the W3C posted the first public working draft of "XProc: An XML Pipeline Language." This is perhaps the last significant core technology for XML. XProc is an XML vocabulary that defines a processing pipeline for a document system. For example, one frequently asked question is whether to do XInclude resolution before or after validation. The answer is: "It depends." XProc lets you write a document that tells the parser which steps it should perform when, and configure different pipelines for different needs. Two more drafts followed in the next few months, and implementations are starting to trickle out. Look for a finished spec next year.
Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) was the second important initial W3C working draft this month. It appears that semantic Web enthusiasts have given up on getting Web authors and publishers to provide useful metadata for their own pages. In keeping with the old maxim that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, they have decided they're more likely to get useful metadata if they infer it from the pages than if they rely on page authors to provide it. GRRDL defines a means of associating an XSLT stylesheet with a page or namespace. This stylesheet scrapes the page for implicit metadata, which it then presents in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. The semantic Web folks can then process this inferred metadata with their RDF tools. Sounds like a plan to me. Time will tell if this will work.
October also saw the final releases of both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. Internet Explorer 7 got more press because it was the bigger upgrade, but I personally wasn't impressed. It was improved, but not enough. If this had come out a year after Internet Explorer 6, it would have been great; but after five years, everyone wanted more. Standards support was a special disappointment because although it was improved, Internet Explorer 7 still didn't fully support CSS; still didn't recognize the correct media types for XHTML and XSLT; still didn't pass the Acid 2 test; and still didn't support SVG, MathML, or XForms.
Firefox 2 was a less ambitious update that didn't add much in the way of new XML goodies. On the plus side, the in-browser spell checking proved invaluable. On the minus side, it broke almost every plug-in on the planet, including the Mozilla XForms plug-in. Plug-ins are slowly being upgraded for Firefox 2 compatibility, but for the moment I've had to downgrade to 1.5 until XForms is fixed.
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November
Not much happened in November that I noticed. I guess everyone either pushed to finish their product before Halloween or was holding off to announce at XML 2006 in December.
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December
December started with the Graphic Communications Association's (GCA) annual XML 2006 conference, the largest XML show of the year. This year's event took place in Boston, where XQuery stood out as the star of the show. Atom was probably second choice. I've written about that conference in depth, so check the [URL=http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xml2006review.html?ca=dgr-lnxw03XML2006#resources]Resources[/URL] section for details.
During the conference, the W3C released XSL-FO 1.1. XSL-FO hasn't seen as wide an adoption as XSLT or some other XML technologies; but it's become mission-critical to the organizations that use it. Version 1.1 adds an assortment of useful new features including multiple flows, change marks, bookmarks, and back-of-the-book indexing. There still aren't any reliable open source implementations of XSL 1.1; but several closed-source vendors have stepped up to support part or all of XSL 1.1, including RenderX's XEP and Antenna House's XSL Formatter 4.1.
Also in December, OpenOffice 2.1 shipped with an assortment of new features. By this point, Microsoft was losing ground fast to OpenDocument. Although Microsoft PowerPoint®, Excel, and especially Word were de facto standards for years, Microsoft never fully documented them and never considered submitting them for official standardization. For more than a decade, they didn't need to. Suddenly, however, a lot of open source partisans showed up in capitals and legislatures around the world, waving the newly approved ISO standard for document formats, and the legislators and bureaucrats listened. Microsoft had to respond, so the company wrote 6,000 pages of documentation for the XML form of the Microsoft Office file formats and shipped it off to the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA), the poor man's standards body. In December, ECMA rubber stamped the spec, so Office Open XML was now also officially a standard.
Finally, if you'll allow me one slightly self-serving mention, 2006 closed with a bang when I uploaded the final release of Jaxen 1.1 on New Year's Eve. Jaxen, originally written by Bob McWhirter and James Strachan, is an open source XPath implementation written in Java that I've been contributing to for several years. Jaxen is the preeminent, object-model independent XPath engine for Java; and version 1.1 is a lot cleaner, faster, and more accurate than version 1.0 was.
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What else happened?
A few technologies continued to grow beneath the surface without major new releases this year. Look for some of them to erupt next year. The much more XML-savvy Atom is rapidly replacing RSS in the field. The Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) went through numerous drafts this year but didn't quite make it to the finish line. When it does, look for it to explode. APP answers a lot of questions people didn't know they had, and not just in the blogging space, either.
APP is a symptom of growing interest in simple, RESTful network systems that work with Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) instead of fighting against it. Speaking of which, I notice that I've gotten to the end of the article and haven't mentioned Web services. That's not a coincidence. Web services fatigue is clearly setting in across the industry. Although OASIS and parts of the W3C continue to churn out ever more Web services specs, most shops haven't yet digested the mountains of specs from previous years. When public services like eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo offer both REST and SOAP interfaces, developers are voting with their feet for the REST solutions by a ratio of about 4 to 1. The promise that tools will solve all the WS-complexity issues remains unfulfilled, because the tools persistently fail to interoperate with each other.
Schema languages are another area in which developers appear to be choosing simplicity and running code instead of complexity and vendor promises. Most XML experts have essentially given up on the W3C XML Schema Language. Serious work is being done in RELAX NG and compiled to W3C schemas only if necessary. The data-binding tools are still clinging to W3C schemas, but otherwise reactions to it range from distaste to disdain.
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Summary
2006 was a productive year for XML. The most sound and fury focused around browsers, with major new releases of every major browser except Safari (which had decent XML, XSLT, and CSS support already). Exact numbers varied depending on who was counting, but the trend was clear. Microsoft Internet Explorer was losing ground and everyone else was gaining. Worldwide, Firefox and other Mozilla derivatives have somewhere between 10% and 20% marketshare -- more than 30% in some European countries. Safari's also gaining, up to maybe 4% (although its adoption depends primarily on how many Macs Apple can sell, not how good its XML support is). Opera's hovering around 1%, mostly on the strength of its embedded browsers for cell phones and game consoles. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer's share may have dropped below 80% for the first time in years, and Internet Explorer 7 doesn't seem likely to reverse that trend.
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Office suites and office file formats were also the subject of much debate, including a lot going on outside normal tech channels. The importance of open, documented, standard file formats has suddenly become a critical issue to governments ranging from Massachusetts to Germany. One piece of that debate is now over, though: Both sides have agreed that the preferred file format will be zipped XML. The debate about binary versus text formats is over. Text won. What remains to be decided is the schema for that XML text.
Ten years ago, the grunt programmers and network admins were installing Web servers on surplus PCs reformatted with Linux while the CEOs and CTOs played golf with salespeople and mandated corporate-wide Exchange Server deployments. Those same low-level techies made XML a success by throwing out decades of legacy binary gook and replacing it with off-the-shelf, open source parsers. Today, these people are quietly installing REST, Atom, and RELAX NG.
The most effective technologies aren't being specced by the W3C, required by thousand-page corporate contracts, or pushed by large vendors. They're growing from the grassroots because developers are looking at them and deciding they work. The people developing these simple systems don't have the budgets for full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal, lobbyists to roam the corridors of power, or sometimes even W3C membership fees; but they do have the right answers, and that matters a lot. The future is looking bright.
Resources
Learn
Bob Sutor [URL=http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1145]dissects Office Open XML[/URL].
Read my [URL=http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xml2006conf.html?ca=dgr-lnxw03XML-Future]XML 2006 Trip report[/URL].
Read the [URL=http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme/proceedings/]Proceedings from Extreme Markup Languages[/URL], 2001-2006.
[URL=http://dsdl.org/]ISO/IEC 19757 - DSDL Document Schema Definition Languages[/URL]: international Standard Schema Languages.
[URL=http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1]XTech 2007[/URL] in Paris next May is the next major XML conference and the European equivalent of XML 2006.
[URL=http://www.ibm.com/certify/certs/xmsdreltop.shtml]IBM XML certification[/URL]: Find out how you can become an IBM-Certified Developer in XML and related technologies.
[URL=http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/xml/library.jsp]XML technical library[/URL]: See the developerWorks XML Zone for a wide range of technical articles and tips, tutorials, standards, and IBM Redbooks.
[URL=http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/techbriefings/?S_TACT=105AGX06&S_CMP=art]developerWorks technical events and webcasts[/URL]: Stay current with technology in these sessions.
Get products and technologies
Experiment with XQuery using the [URL=http://exist.sourceforge.net/]eXist[/URL] native XML database.
Search XML documents with [URL=http://jaxen.org/]jaxen[/URL].
Format XML documents with [URL=http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/]FOP[/URL].
[URL=http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/?S_TACT=105AGX03& S_CMP=art]IBM trial software[/URL]: Build your next development project with trial software available for download directly from developerWorks.
Discuss
[URL=http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/dw_xforums.jsp]XML zone discussion forums[/URL]: Participate in any of several XML-centered forums.
[URL=http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/]developerWorks blogs[/URL]: Get involved in the developerWorks community.
About the author
Elliotte Rusty Harold is originally from New Orleans, to which he returns periodically in search of a decent bowl of gumbo. However, he resides in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn with his wife Beth, their dog Shayna and cats Charm and Marjorie. He's an adjunct professor of computer science at Polytechnic University, where he teaches Java and object-oriented programming. His [URL=http://www.cafeaulait.org/]Cafe au Lait[/URL] Web site has become one of the most popular independent Java sites on the Internet, and his spin-off site, [URL=http://www.cafeconleche.org/]Cafe con Leche[/URL], has become one of the most popular XML sites. His most recent book is [URL=http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/]Java I/O, 2nd edition[/URL]. He's currently working on the [URL=http://www.xom.nu/]XOM[/URL] API for processing XML, the [URL=http://jaxen.codehaus.org/]Jaxen[/URL] XPath engine, and the [URL=http://jester.sourceforge.net/]Jester[/URL] test coverage tool.
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[转帖]XML in 2006 - A review of notable happenings in the world of XML this past year
