How Microsoft Will Play the ISO Card

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XML People: Tim B on TimBL

Here's a rather wonderful document by Tim Bray, one of the key people in the XML world, and someone who evidently knows everyone else there:

XML is ten years old today. It feels like yesterday, or a lifetime. I wrote this that year (1998). It’s really long.

It's also really good for its witty pen portraits of XML notables. Here's a sample: Tim B on TimBL:

TimBL is thin, pale, and twitchy, a well-bred British baby-boomer who circumlocutes and temporizes and gets to the point slowly. Englishly, he deplores confrontation and can find a way to paint any blood-feud in the colours of unfortunate misunderstanding. His publications suggest strong idealism, an overriding vision of the future of information space. His detractors say he’s a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky. The McArthur foundation says he’s a genius. I can’t figure out what he’s getting at half the time, or why he does things, but I’ve known a couple of real geniuses and that’s not necessarily a symptom.

However, I take exception to that idea of TimBL being "a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky." Not so much because it's insulting Sir Tim, but because I think it misses the point entirely. Like RMS's, TimBL's greatest contribution is not actually technical: it is ethical.

Had he not put his code into the public domain - after briefly flirting with the idea of licensing it under the GNU GPL - the Web would not have become the greatest invention of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is for his inspired altruism that we salute Sir Tim - not for anything so trivial as a markup language.

XXX for XML on its Xth Birthday

Back in the good old Web 1.0 days, XML was really hot. Here's a useful reminder that (a) XML is 10 years old (gosh, doesn't time fly when you're having fun?) and (b) it's still hot.

Last month marked ten years since the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) on the Web Editorial Review Board publicly unveiled the first draft of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 at the SGML 96 conference. In November 1996, in the same hotel, Tim Bray threw the printed 27-page XML spec into the audience from the stage, from whence it fluttered lightly down; then, he said, "If that had been the SGML spec, it would have taken out the first three rows." The point was made. Although SGML remains in production to this day, as a couple of sessions reminded attendees, the markup community rapidly moved on to XML and never looked back.

Two areas stand out in this report on the conference: XQuery and Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Here's to the next X.