XML Europe 2001; Tim Bray Returns!

After a notable absence for several years, Tim Bray returned to the XML Europe Conference this spring.  In years past, Bray provided the closing keynote for this conference.  This year he provided a most interesting and challenging opening keynote.

If anyone does not recognize the name Tim Bray, let me provide a bit of history.  For many years, Tim was an active evangelist for SGML. But following his closing keynote at XML Europe in May 1996, Bray joined the group of SGML folk that worked with the Web community to rapidly create the first draft of XML.  Tim is also known for his annotated version of the XML specification. Today you can find that annotated version at www.xml.com (a domain name originally owned by Bray).

In his opening keynote for XML Europe 2001, Bray explained that members of the original team that created XML firmly believed that XML would provide flexible user interfaces for exploring content. Instead XML seems to have found its immediate application in the backroom, connecting databases and disparate server systems.  In Bray's view, the promise of XML on the client side has still to be realized.  According to Bray, today's web applications usually rely on server-side architectures.  His claim is that because client-side technology has progressed little over the last eight years, we have reached a plateau in what the Web can be. "The Web is boring!", proclaimed Bray, "it's full of portals that all look the same and are all boring."

Bray's solution is a new generation of Web applications that take advantage of the power of the PC to improve the quality and responsiveness of the interface offered to the user. Today, Bray claims, over 95% of a PC's time is spent doing next to nothing. Only when we begin to take advantage of PC power, will out Web experience improve.  Bray believes that with Javascript, the DOM and SVG, there's enough power in browsers now to serve as a useful user interface platform. It is no surprise to find that Bray's latest venture, AntarctiCa, is in the process of improving the state of client-side technology. It will be interesting to track whether Bray's new evalgelism and the quality of his software will result in real changes in Web browsing.

In addition, Bray, among other notable members of that original XML team, is calling the bureaucracy and overhead of current W3C activities into question.  One issue raised by Bray concerns SOAP.  This XML-based messaging protocol, developed outside W3C, enables message passing between applications using XML and HTTP . Bray believes SOAP will play a significant role in the future of Web applications and explained that SOAP implementations and deployment are already quite widespread. According to Bray, W3C should have rubber-stamped SOAP and got on with things instead of  taking what Bray predicts to be "18 months to make that decision alone."

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