xmlhack: Overheard at WWW10

Beyond the major announcements, WWW 10 had its share of surprising, controversial and innovative statements.

These quotes should not be seen as a summary of the WWW10 conference, nor as statements with which we agree. They are just sentences that we have found worth reporting and are listed by chronological order.

The charter of the XML Protocols WG isn't to invent anything new.

XForms original simplicity disappeared when we had to use XML Schema

XML data standards are not really needed (data standards have always failed in the past). Standard APIs are the real need.

Voice technologies are a cheap biometric solution for user authentification.

The semantic web is the latest evolution of memes [memes are ideas that propagate like DNA genes].

I have left the SQL standard organizations because some of the features of SQL 89 have never been implemented... The W3c process wouldn't allow this and XQuery wouldn't leave the CR stage if there was not at least two implementations.

What about RDF databases and query language? I have asked the RDF Core Working Group to show evidence through use cases showing that all this couldn't be done with XML Schema and XQuery.