Uche Ogbuji: Introducing MicroXML (XMLPrague 2013)

This presentation is an introduction to MicroXML aimed at the seasoned XML user, detailing its origins and motivations, its design goals, technical differences from XML 1.x and related technologies, and its data model. The presentation will also touch on the process and possible roadmap for MicroXML as well as some efforts building on MicroXML to offer similarly micro schema languages, transformation languages etc. and also to discuss error recovery and such. http://archive.xmlprague.cz/2013/presentations/Introducing_MicroXML.pdf Parts of the XML community have always grumbled that XML is difficult to understand and process. XML is fundamentally complex, for a variety of historical reasons, and people have been proposing simplified versions for over a decade. Others have been advocating alternatives, including YAML,JSON and even HTML5. Recently, under the W3C Community Group process a serious effort was undertaken to produce and formalize a significantly simpler variant of XML, releasing a first public draft of MicroXML. MicroXML is a subset of XML. Its 8-page draft specification covers not only the syntax, but also the design goals, a data model (think the XPath data model or InfoSet, but much simpler) and even non-normative sections with a suggested JSON representation and a log of changes to XML. MicroXML represents an enormous simplification of XML without losing its essential character, which benefits developers as well as users. In fact there are already several experimental implementations of MicroXML just months after its first public draft release, in Java, Javascript and Python.