O’Reilly XML.com: XML You Can Touch (XML in use in GNOME)

“So it’s time to introduce a new way of ranking XML
technologies. Being somewhat fed up of the dot-bomb and marketing
ethos that newest is best, I prefer to maintain that tangible is
best. What I mean by tangible could be helpfully illustrated by a
story: my first job in the computer industry was working for a news
agency. Unusually at the time for a software developer, I got a lot
of satisfaction from the fact that hundreds of thousands of people
would see the result of my work. I could show a newspaper to my
family and say “I did that!”

An exciting use of XML for me now isn’t just a spec, it’s a use
of XML that will actually result in something, well, useful. Maybe
you can’t show your family, but there might be a chance that more
than a handful of people will value what you’re up to. This leads
me to talking about particular projects that make good use of XML.
Although open source programs for direct manipulation of XML are
often trumpeted, for instance, Xalan and Xerces, we’ve seen less
attention paid to the deployment of XML within the more general
field of open source software. There are in fact some interesting
results to be found. Nobody has forced open source developers to
use XML, and they’re certainly not in it for the money or
buzzword-compliance, so we can find there uses of XML where it
stands on its own merits.

Aside from being immersed in XML, I’ve been a keen follower of
the GNOME desktop project for a good while. Thanks in no small part
to the efforts of Daniel Veillard, an ex-W3C hack now working at
Red Hat, GNOME has adopted XML quite deeply. GNOME’s core XML
component, LibXML, provides the platform with an implementation of
SAX, DOM, XSLT, and even OASIS catalogs.”

Complete
Story