Recent scrutiny of the W3C and its specifications
showed no signs of abating this week. Once again, XML-DEV has
provided a forum for some searching questions.
Seeking the Sacred Grove
Last week's XML-Deviant highlighted the complaint from
the SGML camp about the neglect of the HyTime standard (ISO 10744). One
concept from HyTime touted as having application in XML is
that of "groves." Debate
continued this week on why groves—a seemingly
powerful model—have been largely ignored. Lars Marius Garshol suggested
several reasons for our failure to understand groves:
- lack of suitable presentational material
- the fact that it comes from a different community with
a different philosophy and terminology
- the extreme suspicion with which many W3C (and other)
people view anything coming out of ISO
processes
- the fact that groves and the DOM have different purposes
Several contributors pointed out the lack of a clear body of documentation for groves. The current "definitive"
introduction to the subject is "Addressing the
Enterprise: Why the Web needs Groves" by Paul Prescod.
The consensus appears
to be that groves are an essentially simple idea,
yet their accessibility is hindered by their largely abstract expression in the current documentation. Norman Gray comments:
The flip-side of the Simplicity is that the standard is somewhat
abstract (ahem!) and, like all grand projects, has its own
universe of concepts. Also, I found it rather difficult to
work out from the standard just what problem 10744 was
trying to solve.
What problem was 10744 trying to solve? Len Bullard thought that taking a historical perspective
might lead to a better understanding of the specification. He posed a set of questions
in an attempt to unlock key points behind the groves' design rationale.
Bullard proposed that looking at the history of the project might at least provide a means for evaluating its usefulness:
"If we can understand the decisions made during the decade-long
design of ISO 10744, we can better understand the concepts because
we will understand the problems it tries to solve before we try
to understand how it solves them. It took ten years to make
HyTime obscure. The W3C has beaten that speed record with
the XML specs."
Is history repeating itself here? If HyTime requires a "Yoda session" with
a "Markup Master" to be fully understood, what hope do the many XML
Apprentices have in absorbing its content, with only the
specification for guidance?
The concern is that XML may be headed down a similar road to complexity.
W3C specifications have been criticized for obscurity;
those familiar with them can tell you about the subtle pitfalls one faces when trying to combine the specifications.
The recent Slashdot discussion
on the merits of XML, while colorful in places, provides a useful
outside perspective on the debate.
Nils Klarlund had cause to comment in a similar vein:
In my experience, undergraduate students must sometimes struggle quite
a bit just to understand trees and their classical algorithms. The
challenge is to convince the outside world ... that XML is an utterly practical interface to
ideas that seemed too abstract in school.
Klarlund also suggested that the XML specification ought to be a
"propaganda" document, introducing
key concepts in as accessible a manner as
possible.
Questioning the Oracle
Groves aside, the question of the competency of the W3C was again
raised by Steven Newcomb.
This time the complaint was the lack of an overall
technical vision, and the problems inherent in the
process of dividing work packages
between independent technical committees.
The W3C process appears to be based on the naive belief that
independent design assignments for all the various aspects of
Web-based information interchange can be made to a plethora of
independent technical committees, and, in the end, everything can be
made to work together somehow.
Newcomb is very disturbed by the current W3C leadership, which
he says "systematically ignored"
the various "dazzlingly brilliant insights of
James Clark" from HyTime. He also claims that the W3C is wasteful of members' contributions.
He urged that the
W3C should be made to answer several questions regarding how, in
practice, the unification of
specifications such as XLink, XML Schema, and XHTML should be
achieved.
Tim Bray responded on the topic of the W3C coordination
efforts, saying:
The W3C is well-supplied (some would say "infested") with
Co-ordination Groups which exist precisely to detect cases where
different working groups need to do extra work to ensure consistency
and interoperability between their output. A tremendous amount of
time and effort goes into this work.
Bray continued by noting that while the W3C processes may not be
perfect, there isn't an obvious right way to tackle what
he terms "the largest experiment in information processing ever
attempted":
... at this point in history it seems obvious that of
the 3 models of work we have before us (ISO, IETF, W3C), none can be
said to have been shown to be either triumphant or bankrupt, based
on results. The most likely conclusion is that they excel in different
problem domains.
As Len Bullard commented, in many cases the same Masters are at work in each organization (the sterling work of James Clark within the W3C being a case in point).
Attempting to address the issue of W3C vs. ISO vs. IETF on purely
political grounds therefore seems
rather inappropriate.
What is clear is that the path from XML Apprentice to Master is a difficult one; additional signposts are needed
along the way, as well as maps to already discovered lands.
Back to Earth: SAX2
Setting aside loftier debates, great progress has been made with the
news that a beta release of SAX2/Java is
now available. This version is again the product of considerable discussion on XML-DEV
and includes a number of new features, as announced by David Megginson:
- Namespace support.
- Configurability and extensibility through features and properties.
- A new interface and base class for SAX filters.
- Adapters for using SAX1 parsers with SAX2 and vice-versa.
- Way too much JavaDoc documentation.
- Public domain (even less restrictive than Open
Source).
Although SAX/C++ is still some way off, it is likely to be based on SAX2, rather than on the original SAX API.
The first proposal for
additions to SAX2 is also already on the table. The development and
beta release
of SAX2 is certainly good news for all XML developers, Masters and Apprentices alike.
