|
A WebDeveloper.com Feature
|
Time Out From Behaviors
by Nate Zelnick
Trying to Hit a Moving Target is No Fun
This week I wanted to talk about Microsoft's proposal for encapsulating
programmatic function in reusable objects--the alternative to the Action
Sheets proposal that Netscape made to the World Wide Web Consortium in June
that I talked about last time.
Unfortunately, because of some last-minute changes to the specification,
anything I said about Behaviors at this point would likely be wrong. Writing
about technology means always reserving a backup topic. So I started to work
on an explanation of namespaces in XML. But at the last minute, the
namespaces specification started to fluctuate radically. So I tried to write
about the XML DOM. Oops, no luck. The XML DOM is also unfinished. Sigh.
The lesson to be learned from this is that technologies--especially Internet
technologies--are getting much harder to throw over the wall and out onto the
general Web.
Given the problems with the ad hoc growth of HTML over the last few years,
this is a good thing. It is actually comforting to find that the various
committees working on XML are attempting to ensure that the specification
will not emerge with some fundamental flaws that will only be amplified as
the layers of technology are wrapped around the core. But it also means that
we can all expect to wait awhile before the promise of XML is fulfilled.
So what, exactly, is the problem?
XML, as I've showed in a previous column, is pretty easy to implement. But
XML on its own doesn't really do anything. As it stands in the 1.0
specification, XML is a syntactical standard that can define structured data
in a human readable way. That data can be parsed and then handed off to an
application. The application has to handle all of the hard stuff.
So obviously, the next trick is to apply some standard services to XML so
that structured documents and applications can work better together. The
first step in this is the XML DOM. And it's here that things start to get
hairy.
[ Click here to move to the next part of the article ]
Contact the WebDeveloper.com® staff
Last modified:
Friday, 22-Aug-2008 13:46:48 EDT
|
and find truth, justice, and a clue or two.
