Introduction

Only the Brits in the audience (and maybe not all of them) will appreciate why I feel like Swiss Tony, standing here. Because, you know, coming to a conference like this really isa bit like making love to a beautiful woman. On day one, everything is new and wonderful: her laugh, the way she does her hair, that special dress sense of hers, the way she wants to get to know all about you: there's dancing on the rooftops and permanent sunshine. That's day one. On day two, you're starting to feel at home: you know how to make her laugh, you recognise her favourite outfits, she understands your jokes: you recognise the gurus, and the learners; maybe they've got your number too; you're beginning to see how it all fits together. And that's day two. But then comes day three and her giggle is beginning to get on your nerves; she finishes your sentences for you; you wish she'd dress her age... there are people whose eyes you now know to avoid, and maybe you've sucked this experience dry, at the end of the third day.

But this is a four day conference! And that's why I'm here to remind you why you came, what the dream was, and maybe to revive it.

The dream story

Let me start by reminding you about the SGML dream. It had three chief ingredients: the ability to share data between applications the ability to regain and retain control of our data and, putting those together, the ability to proceed towards a seamless integration of data resources, in a new kind of processing interlingua, a digital demotic.

But the way was hard, and the path was only for the upright in spirit until round about 1994 or 1995, when something rather unusual happened to an obscure experiment in scientific documentation methods at a well known European Research Centre in Switzerland, and then before anyone quite understood what was happening, we were all suddenly ensnared in a world wide web.

I think it took a while for people to realise what this meant: for example, at the last SGML Europe conference I attended in Munich, in 1996, the key events were not the decision (taken a year earlier) to open up the internet to commercial competition, not the publication of HTML 3.2, but rather the publication of DSSSL; and some reorganization and realignment of various competing areas of HyTime and DSSSL activities, notably the definition of the Standard Document Query Language and of the HyTime "general facilities" (aka the useful bits: architectural forms, property sets, groves, formal system identifiers etc).

The web was mentioned of course, but am I alone in remembering that there seems to have been a little reluctance invite this bad-mannered grubby infant into the parlour? My visit report on the conference (see http:) quotes Goldfarb's announcement of a "Purity Test" for so-called SGML-conformant application and also remarks: When titans meet, Dr Goldfarb opined, one should find another field -- sound advice, with reference to web browser wars, but perhaps rather defeatist for those of us who think that the SGML community might have something to learn from the runaway success of the web.

But then along came XML and the world changed forever. Of course, we all know that XML has exactly the same goals as SGML: that's why it's such a great way of re-purposing old SGML talks and training materials. And its establishment followed a similar kind of mechanism (I sometimes wonder to what extent the standardization processes now in place within the W3C were influenced by the ISO procedures which were regarded as anathema by at least some of the early heroic age of webheads). The reallybig difference between HTML and XML was that the former was only retrospectively an SGML application, whereas XML was to be driven, from the start, by true SGML believers, and this time, this time, they were going to get it right.

Even so, there was a slight but highly significant refocussing of objectives for the XML effort. Its original goal was simply to enable the delivery of SGML over the web. But in achieving this goal, almost accidentally, Bosak's Boys and Girls found themselves refocussing the whole of web development: effectively rewriting the rules of the game by adding intelligence to data. And this time, this time, it worked!

But can you touch pitch and not be defiled? In 1997, Jon warned us to be ready for the big time: history since then has shown with what accuracy he at least foresaw what was coming. I'd like to ask the question "who are we?" Is there still such as thing as the SGML (or XML) community? I don't know how to answer the question, but it needs to be asked, if only because it makes us ask another difficult question: what makes a community anyway? Communities are defined positively in a number of ways -- by sharing common goals, a common language, or some shared experience. And they are also, very effectively defined, by having a common enemy. Listening to the speakers at "our" conference, I have found myself wondering to what extent we do constitute a community.

For some of our speakers it seems that the goals of XML are business as usual: using XML, it has been said, will confer three benefits: reduce production time reduce time to market and improve quality all of which sounds fine, until you start wondering whether the points really should be placed in that order of priority.

For others, I think there's a different agenda. After all, XML is not just about exchanging data between machines. It's also about communication between humans. XML is not just about the web. It's about information in general. XML is not just about technology. It's also about the social and political relationship between content creators and software vendors.

As I said earlier, there is a key part of the SGML dream which has to do with user ownership of content, and that is something which the social agenda of XML has inherited. By enabling, in a practical and visible way, the elusive freedom from proprietary data formats, vendor neutrality, platform neutrality, and language neutrality, to which all Open systems vendors give lip service, XML has brought back on to the agenda some rather interesting and important economic and political considerations.

Jon Bosak has pointed out that, if realised, the dream-team combination combination of XML and XSL could easily replace all existing word-processing and publishing formats. And even if you share Michael Leventhal's views on XSL, or if you just think that XSL remains a good idea whose time has already been and gone, it remains clear that some combination of XML, the DOM, and XQL is already making several current database systems look to their laurels.

This kind of change, the practical liberation of users from a combination of proprietary formats, should mean an end to domination of the market by a few big companies, and an end to domination of the market by a few big countries. What can prevent that? Clearly companies whose business models have been built on control through proprietary formats can be expected to resist this, and we, the XML evangelists, must be ready to persuade them to rethink those models, using a language that makes business sense. But what shall we say to the users who are quite content to accept that domination?

There is a problem here: to say that the XML agenda is one of user-empowerment is easy enough. But empowerment is not so easily achieved. It's not unusual to encounter significant resistance to the idea that the user should be able to take control from users themselves: empowerment is not quite such an easy sell when your clientele really wants a completely packaged solution. That's why the production of cheap and easily customised tools should be given a much higher priority within our community: only with tools that offer the full power of XML to the mass market will that market be able to develop. We should question marketing factoids about the need to dumb down our software. Software for the mass audience doesn't have to be feature and complexity free: you heard it here first.

Among the many insights I gained at this conference was a possible answer to a question which has been bothering me for a long time: why exactly is it that SGML and XML have not been universally taken up as the technologies of choice for the digital library? After all, librarians have been trying to set information free from proprietary forms (that's books, to you and me) for centuries; they were the first (some might say the best) infomediaries, and the first to develop really powerful platform-independent metadata repositories which could communicate in a reliable way. (that's catalogues and interlibrary loan to you and me). So why do all librarians swear by (and occasionally at) the decidedly non-standard MARC standard, developed in the 1970s, and vigorously maintained ever since rather than migrate to more modern interchange formats? The answer, of course, is that the conversion-cost is simply not warranted once you have a tool that does the job -- however unfashionably. What benefit is there in "going-XML" for the librarian who has already made massive investment in a well tested and debugged solution to the same problems? Only by focussing on the value-added, on areas where solutions don't already exist, will XML will make its case: as witness the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of XML in the library community are those concerned with areas that the traditional library systems handle only grudgingly or incompletely -- such as full text electronic libraries, repositories of digitized images and archival document descriptions.

I came across a new term for something that XML makes easier this week: data warehousing. Now, like many other metaphors, this is an insidious one: it sounds alluring, but it leads you astray. Data is not really something you keep in a warehouse: a warehouse is designed to keep commodities like bicycles or fruit safe until you decide to take them out and sell them. Once out of the warehouse they are gone. But is that true of data too? if I sell you an apple, I don't have it to sell to someone else anymore. But if I sell you access to my data -- you have it and I stillhave it. Is this metaphor helping us understand the way information should be managed in the next millenium, or is it getting in the way?

Some trends I spotted

Walking around the impressive exhibition space here, it's clear that there has been somewhat of a shakedown in the market place. One impressive change from the last time I looked, is that we no longer have vendors offering us "XML bolt ons" -- if a product offers XML support at all, it does it whole heartedly, not as an afterthought, and not, generally, as one of a number of alternatives. Like other maturing industries, we are seeing evidence of consolidation, as the bigger players eat up the smaller ones. Yet this industry continues to surprise us with the unexpected appearance of start-ups with innovative new ideas: let us salute them, since they are what drives the XML enterprise forward. As to the consultants, I overheard more than one person say wistfully "I really have to start turning down more work", so something must be going right.

What trends are discernible? The gap between "data" and text" continues to narrow. As we move increasingly into a wired world, we see systems which are datacentric or docucentric rather than application focussed. We see more and better descriptive language energing for graphics, for maths, and for other multimedia. I am glad to be able to salute the decline of the blob as a significant concept in information management: information wants, not only to be free, but also to be intelligent.

As the technology matures, and artificial boundaries between data types decline, so new application areas are enabled : one particularly in evidence here is in the healthcare profession, but all manner of new infomedariesare beginning to come out of the woodwork, looking for the value-added in the distribution of unchained information.

One of the best features of this conference, for me, is its technical component. So I hope you'll allow me to comment just briefly on a few of what I perceived as the key technical issues. First off, I see that the use of "document fragments" or "micro-documents" seems to have been re-invented again, this time in the shape of data-centric or application-focussed groves which are being extracted from large databases, document repositories, and those famous data warehouses. We heard several striking case histories demonstrating the viability of this approach. Secondly, we had a debate about whether or not DTDs were good for you, which sadly failed to ignite controversy (maybe asking this audience such a question is like asking an audience of priests whether prayer is really beneficial). The debate never really addressed the question of whether the second D is short for "definition" or for "declaration" -- whether a DTD should contain more than a bald declaration of syntactic constraints. We heard quite a bit of thought provoking material about the need for more than that: in particular from the XML work groups trying to address the needs of those W3C communities who are demanding a generally viable semantic model. Whatever we get from this activity, it clearly won't be that particular philosophers' stone: the best we can hope for from schemata will be DTD grammars with new added datatypes.

Semantics, you will recall from your Elementary SGML Class, are expressly excluded from consideration by the standard. Letting them in by the backdoor, we might consider semantics of link types, but a more promising line of attack, which we also heard a fair bit about, concerns the usefulness of XML in addressing the metadata issue: that is, the issue of how to talk about what we are talking about. In RDF we see an XML application which addresses the problem in terms familiar to many software developers (if no-one else), while in topic maps we see another approach, using concepts familiar to information professionals

Of course, there were a few things I missed. We still don't have enough free software. We still don't have enough software which really supports 32-bit pure Unicode. We still don't have software that runs equally well on multiple platforms. And while many new important application areas for XML have appeared, we don't hear about its importance in the preservation of our cultural heritage, and we don't seem to hear much from people facing up to the problems of preserving that culture heritage once transferred to the digital medium. Maybe this really will be the first generation that leaves absolutely no trace of itself behind it: particularly if all of our day to day transactions, communications, and cultural activities have gone digital, without our having developed any way of preserving digital information as reliably and permanently as our ancestors were able to preserve scraps of paper and parchment. Here surely XML has a lot to offer.

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but technology alone won't help us: we also need to remember the vision that informs and drives the technology. So I would like to close with a couple of examples of great XML applications that I think won't ever happen, not because they are technically infeasible or undesirable, but for entirely other reasons. First: consider the wonderful online version of the which Oxford University Press has been developing over the last few years. Consider also the wonderful collection of full text literary databases which another British publisher, Chadwyck-Healey, has also been developing over the last few years. Both products between them cover a huge proportion of the English literature of the last 500 years, a central part of whatever we mean when we talk about our cultural heritage. Both products use SGML as the primary means of managing their data. But can you integrate them? Could you or I or any other ingenious and suitably-motivated researcher develop a nice little XML pointer-based application linking, for example, dictionary senses and discussions from the OED with a range of illustrative citations from ? Well, no, or not until both publishers open the door of their data warehouse sufficiently for us to access that SGML structure. And if that example sounds too recherché or academic, consider your monthly grocery shopping bill. We all know that the supermarkets are rushing to join the e-commerce revolution, but here's an e-commerce application that I confidently predict will not get developed any time soon: the one which searches across the price lists of all available online stores to determine who's offering the best deal on baked beans or olive oil or coffee this week, constructs the appropriate orders and sends them in. With all the required data in XML format, I could develop that application today, and so could most of you -- but not so long as the doors of the data warehouse remain firmly shut.

However, I dont want to finish on a carping note. I started with a metaphor, and I suggested that metaphors can distract you from the truth as readily as they express it. But for me, this conference really is a long-lasting love affair, one that has matured into a real relationship, indeed. It's about open systems, and intellectual rigour, but it's also about the real world. That's why the conference offers a neutral platform-independent venue, at which we can hear from the vendors as well as from the gurus, at which the users have a platform as well as their advisers and consultants. And every year it gets better -- so, see you next year in Paris!