XML News from Sunday, April 3, 2005

As well as the guffaw-inducing XML Binary Characterization working draft, the W3C Not XML Working Group has updated three other working drafts:

What scares me about "Not XML" is that the purveyors aren't going to be satisfied with designing simple filters that convert heir format into real XML for integration into the tool chain. As soon as they've defined their fornat, they're next going to look at "fixing" other specs to more efficiently support "Not XML". I think we need to reject this in advance. If the "Not XML" group is really serious about compatibility (which I doubt) they will agree that they will not propose or make any modifications to SAX, DOM, XPath, XSLT, XQuery, XInclude, the XML Infoset, or any other XML technology. They will not add methods to the XML APIs that receive byte arrays or double instead of char[] arrays and Strings. They will not add new properties to the Infoset. They will not add special functions to XSLT and XPath to process binary data. Of course, if they want to create new API and tools to process their Not XML format, that's fine; as long as they don't use the word "XML" to describe what they're doing. But I'm afraid that hijacking the underlying XML specification is just the first step toward a hostile takeover of the entire XML stack.