The Stability of XML

Many people are concerned about the variety and stability of XML. The currently approved standard is XML 1.0 (second edition).^[76] Unfortunately, the practices of the software community over the last two decades have conditioned users to avoid 1.0 releases of anything. "Wait until they iron out the bugs," "Don't be a guinea pig," and "Wait for the 3.0 release" are common rules of thumb.

But XML really is different. There is a huge amount of history behind it. The originally proposed specification from 1996 is scarcely different at a level that most people would recognize from the current spec. There is a 1.1 spec, and although there are differences that would be important to parsers and tool writers, the average user will not recognize some of the suggested improvements (e.g., changes to the "new line" conventions).

To the best of my knowledge there is no 2.0 spec in the works, and anyone who waits for the 3.0 release is going to be waiting a long, long time.

Some of the perception of the unstableness of XML is really meant for the many derivatives that have been built on top of XML. We will deal with them later in this chapter in the section on XML derivatives. Before we get to that, though, we need to clear up something we've left unsaid—namely, that nothing we have said yet sheds any light on XML as a semantic tag language.

^[76]See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml for the W3C XML 1.0 spec.