On Sep 11, 2007, at 12:31 AM, Anthony B. Coates (XML-Dev) wrote:
> There are long-term financial instruments (like swaps: http://
> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swap_%28finance%29) which can extend to 30
> years or more. Many institutions are encoding these using FpML
> (Financial Products Markup Language: http://www.fpml.org/), with
> their own custom extensions, and they will need to be able to
> access this data in 2037 or later.
>
> If XML has been surpassed in popularity by some competing
> technology by 2027 or 2037, I suspect that what you will find is
> that institutions who need it will maintain staff who know how to
> use and run their XML tools
Maybe I'm missing something, but XML feels like a safer long-term bet
to me if only because almost all those tools are (a) open-source, and
(b) written in mainstream languages and (c) written for
portability. So you won't get the situation you get in some IT
shops I've seen where a horrible old PDP-11 or Unisys box is kept
limping along at great expense because they occasionally need some
long-forgotten black-box proprietary app. I.e., whatever it is we
call a "computer" in 2027 will probably run libxml2 and Jing just
fine. -T
