The future of XML

The wheels of progress turn slowly, but turn they do. The crystal ball might be a little hazy, but the outline of XML's future is becoming clear. The exact time line is a tad uncertain, but where XML is going isn't. XML's future lies with the Web, and more specifically with Web publishing.

It seems a little funny to have to say that. After all, isn't publishing what the Web is about? The Web was designed first and foremost as a mechanism to publish information. What else can it do? Quite a lot...

XSLT and XML office formats will also bring a lot of hidden data out into the open. Numerous business documents have languished unread in file systems for the last decade or more. Most of them are doubtless irrelevant today, but some of them contain important information that's been forgotten because no one can search it. Corporate developers will extract and repurpose information from existing Office documents, first by automating conversion to newer XML-based formats, and then using XSLT and XQuery to make the data findable....