Summary
One weakness upon which most presenters agree is the ineffectiveness of XML Schema, which Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems (and co-inventor of XML), described as "totally beyond its 'sell by' date."
Chris Anderson, an architect on the MS Windows client platform team working on the technologies code-named "Avalon," said developers "hate systems that force XML to be more than data." His answer: XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language), which "provides a format to facilitate between developers and designers … a unified way to build applications to leverage markup."
Sam Ruby, senior technical staff member in the Emerging Technologies group at IBM, spent 45 minutes showing other experts how "the standards don't reflect reality; reality has moved on," particularly in regard to Unicode. Even when default encodings for HTML, XML and Microsoft are different, and XML Namespaces requires that the URI examples be considered distinct, System.Uri.Equals may return "true."
Not every aspect of XML is judged to be a potential disaster—far from it. Two presentations have demonstrated how XML is enabling solutions in the real world: one from the U.S. Department of Defense on using XML for Navy missile systems, and a presentation from Scott Hanselman and Patrick Cauldwell of Corillian about effectively using XML in financial systems.
XML Developers Push for Simplicity