Norm Walsh on The Content Wrangler

Check out this wonderful interview of industry XML guru and Mark Logician Norm Walsh on The Content Wrangler, entitled Endless Possibilities: Norm Walsh on the Changing Nature of Publishing.

Favorite quotes:

• On how long he's been doing XML: "I’ve been doing XML since we spelled it SGML"

• On joining Mark Logic: "As soon as I started talking to people at Mark Logic and had a chance to play with the server, I knew I’d found a group of exceptionally sharp folks who shared my passion for XML."

• On transforming to a database mentality: "Instead of grabbing everything I might need and then filtering through it, I should push the constraints down into the database. Instead of applying XPath expressions to a document I had in hand, I could apply it to the whole database and get nearly instantaneous answers."

• On self-characterization: "I’m a document guy. I think that most of what’s really important to an organization is bound up in documents one way or another."

• On MarkLogic Server integration: "Full text, structured and geospatial searching, for example, are all independent features, but you can compose them together arbitrarily and it “just works” *at speed*."

• On XML ubiquity: "As far as XML goes, we’ve reached a point where it’s used in everything from traditional book publishing to mobile phones to gas pumps. I bet some part of your communication with the world passes through XML more often than you realize on any given day. Everyone using a recent version of Microsoft Office or Open Office is using XML, they just might not know it. I think widespread, general acceptance is upon us."

• On imprint-bias towards relational databases: "If you weren’t already biased by the tabular database systems that you already have, could you imagine in a million years that you would look at an XML document and think, yeah, let’s decompose the elements in this document and put them in columns in tables?"

The full interview is here and I've made a Wordle of it below.