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>If you're wondering about whether browsers will end up
>offering competing XML extensions (or some other makes-
>it-hard-to-develop-usable-pages garbage)...probably
>not. Because XML is completely customizable, you (not
>the browser companies) are in charge of what features
>are available.
A word of clarification on extensibility. XML is not a tagging language, it
is a language for defining tagging languages. XML itself is not user
extensible. Only the XML working group can extend XML.
Tagging languages written in XML are extensible. All tagging languages are
extensible. It is a myth that HTML is not extensible. The browser wars were
all about extensions to HTML. HTML is now at or approaching version 4.0 --
impossible if it was not extensible.
The point is, tagging languages are extensible by the people who create
them. More specifically, they are extensible by the people who write the
applications that process them (browsers, for example). (HTML 3.0 was
proclaimed by W3C, but it was a dud because the browsers did not support it.
HTML 3.2 was a reduced language the defined the tagging that the browsers
actually supported. The processing application is king.) So yes you can
customize your XML, because you write your XML based tagging language, and
your own processing applications.
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Mark Baker
Manager, Corporate Communications
OmniMark Technologies Corporation
1400 Blair Place
Gloucester, Ontario
Canada, K1J 9B8
Phone: 613-745-4242
Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- omnimark -dot- com
Web: http://www.omnimark.com
