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  • From: "Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>
  • To: "InterNetWorkers" <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: XML!=Pixie Dust (link)
  • Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 01:17:07 -0400


Good article off of the Software Development magazine newsletter.

http://www.sdmagazine.com/

I started working with XML in '97 so the buzz over the last few years has been
interesting to me. This article sets a few things straight.

(Mind you, I think XML is great at what it does.)

[no link, just text]

--------

Turtles All the Way Up
Clay Shirky bewails the danger of XML pixie dust.

"XML is one of those dangerous technologies," Clay Shirky told a packed hall
of SD West attendees during his Thursday afternoon keynote. "It's one that
managers know about; you can almost see them sprinkling the magic pixie dust,
saying 'Well, you should be able to do that, it's XML, right?' Meanwhile,
you're saying, 'You shouldn't even know that word!'" The audience members'
rueful laughter revealed that many had been there. "XML is going to make the
standards wars worse," Shirky continued. "That's the bad news. If it's easy to
write up a standard, everybody's going to write one."

Shirky, a consultant and author specializing in peer-to-peer and other
distributed technologies, attacked widely held assumptions about XML and Web
services. Because XML by itself is so easy to customize, he said, "XML is not
a lingua franca--It's not even a lingua--it's an alphabet." He pointed out
that SOAP protocols don't come close to guaranteeing interoperability; five
registered versions of a stock-ticker service that Shirky looked up couldn't
even agree on the type of the content. "It's a five-digit number!" he
exclaimed in disbelief.

No Cheap Shots

Shirky didn't waste time with cheap shots, however. Instead, he clearly
delineated why we can't expect to take the borderless, stateless World Wide
Web, map software onto it, and expect it all to hook up--and scale up. He
showed how various "state horizons" appear as you attempt to connect software
to the world, and provided some directions for coordinating across them. "The
border is no longer tied to the physical bounds of the box," he claimed. For
example, "trust horizons" define the limits of who can use resources on your
computer. There are good security models for en route encryption, but that's
not the point, he said. "The issue with the trust horizon is not packet
sniffing, but do you honor the request when it gets there? There are no good
solutions to this problem; three of the commonest are restriction,
registration and identity."

Probably the most pressing question concerns the "coordination horizon": "Will
Web services work at Internet scale--an uncoordinated market where millions
are talking to millions," Shirky asked, and noted that this big unknown has
its origins in the design patterns of the Web. "The Web got where it is by
[having] the simple definitions of HTTP and HTML on one side, and by having a
human being on the other. The 64-million-dollar question is: Does the Web work
because it's so simple, and will Web services fail because it's so complex?"
Shirky then revealed his favorite four-letter acronym, in the UDDI spec: the
Universal Service Interoperability Protocol, and then noted dryly that this
does not exist yet. "It's turtles all the way up," he laughed. "You can't get
to interoperability just by adding another layer at the top of the stack."

--Rick Wayne






  • XML!=Pixie Dust (link), Michael D. Thomas, 04/26/2002

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