State of the Net Survey on XML

Monday, August 17, 1998 by Dave Winer.

Today I'm using DaveNet to do research on the state of the net, specifically the deployment of XML-based applications.

As with other connective technologies, XML is only interesting if other software and content developers support it. So let's find out what's available.

Who, what... where? 

So, if you manage a content team or operate servers and are running apps that produce publicly accessible XML-formatted files, please enter the URLs for these files in this form:

http://betty.userland.com/stateOfTheNet/xml/default.wsf

Someone from UserLand will download each XML file and run it thru our test scripts. If files are generated automatically according to a time-based formula, we'll attempt to write a script that processes the files on a regular basis.

We'll publish a report on our findings, as we go, linked into the Scripting News home page. If you're pointing to a private site, please say so in the Comment area and we won't publish links to your site.

We may re-run this survey in the future to see how XML is being deployed by other web developers.

Expectations 

I think it's still early for XML-based information on the net. I would be very pleased if we turned up four or five interesting XML applications. Of course it would be even better if there were ten or twenty.

Questions 

The main questions we want to answer are:

1. How much XML is there on the net?

2. How good is the XML? Does it conform to the standard? Does it contain useful or interesting information? Is the idea of XML taking hold?

3. Any other questions that come up. (The catch-all.)

Thanks for participating in the survey, I hope we get some great results!

Dave Winer