Developer's Day: XML and DOM Track (Jon Bosak)

Sun Microsystems' Jon Bosak, considered to be one of the fathers of XML, co-chaired the XML and DOM track on the Developer's Day, along with Lauren Wood of SoftQuad. Jon, long time chairman of the XML Working Group (before it split into six groups in October 1998), wrote the seminal article XML, Java, and the Future of the Web in 1997, and more recently Media-Independent Publishing: Four Myths About XML and XML and the Second-Generation Web. Jon is presently the chair of the XML Coordination Group.

Jon spoke of the importance of XML schemas for datatypes and inheritance. He felt that links will become first class objects, although that might take a couple of years for browser support of such links. Link syntax is changing and, along with stylesheets and the DOM, this will "totally change the Web".

He seemed to indicate that DTDs, schemas, and namespaces should be registered with OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), although it is not clear from the Web site how one would go about doing so.

Jon categorized the W3C Working Groups that are XML, DOM, or Style related:

• Architecture Domain: XML Linking, XML Schema, XML Fragments, XML Infoset (data model), XML Syntax Working Groups
• User Interface Domain: XSL Working Group
• Other Related Working Groups: DOM, HTML (now XHTML), CSS and Formatting Properties, Internationalization

He acknowledged that use of XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language), "A Reformulation of HTML 4.0 in XML 1.0", will be tricky with old browsers. Complete backward compatibility is not possible.

Bosak said that XML display methods are shifting from procedural, scripts and programs that don't scale well, to declarative such as stylesheets which, although more limited in functionality, and certainly more manageable. He likened this trend to the shift from PostScript to PDF. In his view, online formats are a superset of print formats since the former must also work properly when the browser frame is resized. He bemoaned the fact that major vendors have done little with XSL Formatting Objects so far, something he feels the Web really needs.

[At the time of this writing, this talk has not yet been made available online.]

Scalable Vector Graphics (Chris Lilley)
WWWhat Happened at WWW8?
DOM: What Are All These Acronyms? (Lauren Wood)