Time Out From Behaviors

by Nate Zelnick

Trying to Hit a Moving Target is No Fun

This week I wanted to talk about Microsoft's proposal for encapsulating programmatic function in reusable objects--the alternative to the Action Sheets proposal that Netscape made to the World Wide Web Consortium in June that I talked about last time.

Unfortunately, because of some last-minute changes to the specification, anything I said about Behaviors at this point would likely be wrong. Writing about technology means always reserving a backup topic. So I started to work on an explanation of namespaces in XML. But at the last minute, the namespaces specification started to fluctuate radically. So I tried to write about the XML DOM. Oops, no luck. The XML DOM is also unfinished. Sigh.

The lesson to be learned from this is that technologies--especially Internet technologies--are getting much harder to throw over the wall and out onto the general Web.

Given the problems with the ad hoc growth of HTML over the last few years, this is a good thing. It is actually comforting to find that the various committees working on XML are attempting to ensure that the specification will not emerge with some fundamental flaws that will only be amplified as the layers of technology are wrapped around the core. But it also means that we can all expect to wait awhile before the promise of XML is fulfilled.

So what, exactly, is the problem?

XML, as I've showed in a previous column, is pretty easy to implement. But XML on its own doesn't really do anything. As it stands in the 1.0 specification, XML is a syntactical standard that can define structured data in a human readable way. That data can be parsed and then handed off to an application. The application has to handle all of the hard stuff.

So obviously, the next trick is to apply some standard services to XML so that structured documents and applications can work better together. The first step in this is the XML DOM. And it's here that things start to get hairy.

[ Click here to move to the next part of the article ]

Refresh Daily
Join Editor-in-Chief David Fiedler The Editor With No Time and find truth, justice, and a clue or two.

[ Site Map ]

ActiveX / VBscript

Animated GIF Archive

Browsers

CGI / Perl

Database Connectivity

E-Commerce

HTML-Advanced: DHTML, CSS

HTML / Site Authoring Tools

Intranet/Groupware

Java

JavaScript

Multimedia: Audio / Video / Streaming Technologies

Opinions

Refresh Daily: Editorial Column

Security

Servers & Server Tools

Site Design / Graphics

Site Management / Marketing / Log File Analysis

VRML / 3D

XML