I seem to be starting too many new threads here. Somebody smack me :)

I think no one will argue with me when I say that XML is very powerful
and certainly has a large future on the Internet. I am starting to
worry about a couple of issues. The XML technology set is very
powerful, however, a lot of companies won't ever use XML to represent
their data structures because it will be a *clear* loss of revenue for
them (maybe entire market sectors).

In a perfect world, the model would work like this. Someone creates an
XML Schema/DTD and then creates an instance of this document. The then
add a stylesheet for the UI.

The problem is that if someone like Amazon/Slashdot were to do this,
they would go out of business.

The problem is already starting to manifest itself. Slashdot publishes
out its content via RSS. The trouble is they leave all the
<description> tags blank because if they did they would just be an XML
server and couldn't IPO or make any money.

So what is the solution to this problem? Honestly this scares me. XML
is huge but will never reach its full potential because companies don't
want to be disintermediated. The last post on stock quote info is a
relevant example. If Yahoo just marked up a stock page as XML and stock
quote data I could use this pretty much with out legal problems (XML
doesn't specify content rendering so I don't think it would be
stealing).

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Could this be a competitive advantage for some companies? If Amazon.com
doesn't publish their content in XML then EBay could compete by making
their web app as an XML communication infrastructure (so that I could
participate in an EBay auction from within another site).

Is this part of a larger problem with regard to content reproduction and
licensing? Basically the whole Napster/MP3/DVD problem rehashed into
XML?

Should the W3C deprecate XHTML and require publishers to use XML with a
new stylesheet rev for UI (XSLT to HTML would not work if XHTML were
deprecated). This might be harsh.

Should the Internet culture finally realize that ad revenue is a faulty
business model and admit that content is a commodity and that it should
be free ( as in Freedom not in Free Beer ). Maybe based a revolution on
a FCL (Free Content License).

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Kevin A Burton (burton@...)
http://relativity.yi.org
Message to SUN: "Please Open Source Java!"
To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence;
supreme
excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
- Sun Tzu, 300 B.C.