Instead of a single keynote speaker at the beginning of the XML 2007 conference (Boston, 3-5 December), we’ve decided to start at 9:00 am on Monday 3 December with an open discussion on the topic Does XML have a future on the web?, led by three panelists:
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Doug Crockford (Yahoo!), a prominent JavaScript expert and the inventor of JSON;
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C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (W3C), a founding member of the working group that created XML and co-editor of the XML 1.0 Recommendation; and; and
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Michael Day (YesLogic), a developer and frequent contributor to O’Reilly’s XML.com blog.
Each of the panelists will make a short opening statement, then we’ll turn on the mics and let the audience take over with questions and comments for the panel.
Background
While XML is used a lot on the web — for syndication, knowledge representation, open APIs, etc. — it certainly hasn’t developed the way we had planned back in 1997–98. XML Namespaces are often misused or simply ignored, other general web-related XML specs like XLink are barely noticed, and the payload in AJAX is often JSON rather than XML. Will there ever be a generic machine-readable web of information to parallel the human-readable web of documents? If so, will that web use plain old XML, RDF, or a non-XML format?
Think up some of your own questions, and we’ll see you in Boston from 3–5 December.
Quoderat 