Apple and XML

Sunday, November 22, 1998 by Dave Winer.

The opportunity for Apple to leverage in XML is pretty enormous, considering that XML, right now, is largely a publishing technology, and the publishing industry is still largely Mac-run.

My company is one of the leaders in this area. We can uniquely build XML-based networks that allow you to mix Macs and Windows machines, as total peers, doing the kinds of things Macs do better than the clones. The advantages of the Mac shine thru, without the possibility of Microsoft-imposed limits, since all the networking is over HTTP.

This isn't some future promise. We've been building these mixed XML-based networks since late spring. We didn't think Macs would be big here, but they are.

And yesterday I got word from Norm Meyrowitz, a top exec at Macromedia, that an upcoming release of Director, also cross-platform, will be able to read and write XML. I'm aware of work going on at lots of other Mac publishing software companies. XML is going to happen, and it's going to be very important on the Mac, for some really interesting reasons.

Networks and publishing. Mac content development workstations and NT servers. Artists and writers using Macs. System managers running NT on the servers. Or Macs as servers.This is a popular combination too. I bet Microsoft would even support it because they'd sell a few WebDAV-compatible copies of Office 2000 on all those workstations; but even if they don't, the idea has legs.

We'll embrace Windows, make networks do the things users want to do, and we'll forget all the bickering. It's so boring! I just want to make software and make the user's dreams come true.

Dave Winer