The Founder of XML
I just finished reading an interview with Tim Bray, who founded XML and is the director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems. The interviewer was Jim Gray, manager of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center. The interview basically left me feeling a little disenchanted about XML and related technologies. Here are some of the highlights:
The main design of XML was sketched in about 20 weeks between July and November 1996…
XML is a lot more complex than it really needs to be. It’s just unkludgy enough to make it over the goal line…
We basically lied and told the world, we would do all that stuff in version 2. You have to shoot the engineers and ship at some point, right? I think there will never be an XML version 2. There is an XML version 1.1, but it’s controversial and not widely supported.
Say it ain’t so, Tim Bray.
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