I used to know what XML is. With one hundred percent certainty I used to know that XML is a way of annotating text to make the structure of the text both open and explicit to machines. I have written a lot of stuff[1] about it over the years.

In the years since the acronym has crossed the chasm[2] into, um, the chasms that follow the first chasm, there has been an enormous proliferation in the usage scenarios for XML. Not all of them wholly appropriate in my opinion but let us not go there today.

For today's purposes, let us focus on two illustrative divergences in the interpretation of that humble TLA "XML".

First up is feed technology. This field has a lot of names including syndication, aggregation, push, rss and atom. We could argue about which are appropriate and which are not but let us not do that. Let it suffice that each of those words has featured in a sentence of the form "we want our website to have X" in one or more consulting engagements I have been involved in.

Would you put XML into that list as an alias for syndication/aggregation/push/rss/atom? I would not but I am increasingly coming across people who do. One possible interpretation of "we want XML on our website" these days is "we want an event notification capability on our website".

Why is that? I can see a number of contributing factors. First, the appearance of the term "XML" in a very popular iconic representation of an event feed[3]. Second, the prevalence of ".xml" as a file naming convention for event feeds. See this search of US government websites for example[4].

Next up is document file formats. Life used to be a lot simpler in this particular space. On one hand, you had XML-based file formats for documents and on the other hand you had nasty, brutish (but highly efficient) binary document formats as used by word processors and DTP packages.

These days, many of the word-processor and DTP native file formats are moving to XML-based notations. The "gang of three" in this space are ODF, OOXML and XHTML. This trend is the cause of much head scratching because it challenges a previously obvious difference between, essentially, XML editing tools and word processors.

I have seen numerous tech-savvy executives go into tailspins of misconception based on this trend. They all end up having "I used to know what XML is. Now I am not so sure" moments. Some of them never recover from them.

I used to know what XML is. Actually, I think I still do but I also used to think I had short, sharp to-the-point mechanisms for explaining it. These days, I'm not so sure. It is becoming harder and harder to explain.

What is the price of success in this industry? Is it irreversible balkanization of what used to be crisply defined terminology? Sometimes I think so. Like it or not we pedants are bobbing around like a cork on the waves that incessantly pass through the industry.

It is as much as we can reasonably do to stay afloat in the tumultuous seas of misunderstandings that are the result of our own creations.

[1] http://www.itworld.com/nl/xml_prac/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

[3] http://radio.userland.com/userGuide/reference/macros/xmlCoffeeMug

[4] http://tinyurl.com/3ardn5

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