Douglas Crockford's Blog

I was invited to speak at XML 2007 last month. I was given the topic "Does XML have a future on the web?" My answer was "yes." As evidence, I offered that there are still people selling Cobol compilers. Once this stuff gets into the enterprise, it can take generations to get rid of it.

A more interesting question is "Is XML on the web trending up or trending down?" Clearly, it is trending down. For data transfer applications, XML is losing ground to JSON because JSON is simply a better data transfer format. And XHTML has failed to displace HTML in the marketplace. The benefit of clientside validation has proven to not be a benefit.

I think you can argue, and in fact I did argue, that because of W3C's adventures with XML, the web itself may not have a future. The browser has a lot of problems, the worst of which are the security problems that came with Netscape Navigator 2. That was 12 years ago, and there has been no progress since that time in fixing the fundamental problems. There have been lots of patches on top of patches. Nothing more.

The web has grown up from a document delivery system to an application delivery system. But the browser has not kept pace, so there are now new proprietary platforms from Adobe and Microsoft and others that are hoping to replace the web.

Michael Sperberg-McQueen was there, and has described my argument as a truly mystifying rhetorical move. Michael and I were on the same panel, at which he wished he had said

It gives me some regret now that I did not interrupt at this moment to point out that XHTML and XForms are precisely an effort (all in all, a pretty good one) to improve the foundations of the Web, but I wasn't quick enough to think of that then.

XHTML is not the solution to a problem that concerns anybody except the guys who have to write parsers that convert markup into DOM trees. It turns out that XHTML put the validation on the wrong end of the network. It turned out that the market didn't put much value in a document delivery system that could decide to not display the document because there was an unrecognized attribute on an invisible meta tag. This same sort of wrong-end-of-the-network thinking can be seen today in the HTML 5 working group's crazy XHR access control language.

Continued...