In "Fathering XML", Jon Bosak, 'Father of XML', looks over the world he helped to create and explores many of its fissure lines, including Architectural Forms, Schemas, SML, XSL Formatting Objects, and the spectre of fragmentation.

Bosak starts the interview by separating the easy from the difficult, describing XML as "basically the opportunity to standardize an essential piece of the IT infrastructure so that we can move on to the harder problem, which is how to define shared semantics."

"Convinced that what we define over the next two years is what we're going to have to live with for the next 30 or 40 years," Bosak is working hard to "avert... the possibility that vertical industry XML standards and the whole marketplace architecture for e-commerce are going to be defined and dominated by proprietary interests."

Bosak sees no clear silver bullets for making XML vocabularies work, finding architectural forms and schema transformations interesting but not magical solutions to semantic problems. Echoing recent discussions on XML-Dev to some extent, he has concerns for the future of XSL Formatting Objects.