XML Xtra from O'Reilly Network

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another issue of XML.com.

A few random notes as we get close to the end of 2007, which, from my perspective, counts as having lived in "interesting times:"

Teardrops from the Mezzanine
M. David Peterson writes a nice tribute to Chimezie and Roschelle Ogbuji's daughters.

On to technical stuff:

HTTP Redrafting

Apparently there is a real movement afoot to revise HTTP; I predict trouble.

Mark Nottingham is on it:
http://www.mnot.net/blog/2007/12/09/rfc2616bis

I've long been something of an HTTP junkie. I'm the guy who's always explaining to coworkers the real difference between PUT and POST, etc. I edited a W3C standard -- SPARQL Protocol -- that's just a tiny layer over (not even over, really) HTTP.

There are HTTP warts that I'd really like to fix (well, MIME types are their own disaster, really), including some caching stuff, as well as dropping a fair bit (well, I *think* there are bits that could be dropped...).

All that said, something about revising HTTP strikes me as...dangerous. I guess we'll see how it goes; but I'd be really surprised if it turns out to be less of a train wreck than HTML5 seems like it could become.

But this is an interesting comparison, now that I think about it: which is more crucial, politically, to big companies? HTML or HTTP? I'm not even sure I can make a guess.

Even more worth pondering is what, if anything, these two standards stories say about the respective standards organizations, the IETF and W3C... My company may actually be one of the smallest members of the W3C ever; but, given that we work on Semantic Web infrastructure, we felt like we had to join. Despite that, I think in some sense I'd enjoy doing IETF standards work more.

As always, thanks for reading.

Kendall Clark, kendall@xml.com
Managing Editor, XML.com