I've had some strange discussions lately, both at XML 2002 and outside, where people seem to think that programming code matters and markup is just an accident, something that really doesn't matter much. Progams are the ones creating and interpreting all that markup, right? So why don't the markup people shut up, roll over, and let the programmers do the real work?

It gets pretty depressing sometimes. There are certainly people out there who grasp the difference between "data" and "code" and understand why the constraints on the two and their respective practices are very different, right?

Getting the details right in your markup should mean that writing the code to process it will be easy, whatever the environment. Instead, a lot of people seem to look at how they write code and assume that what's easy for them is easy for everyone else, so they let their code assumptions flow into their markup design - making their markup easy for them but not necessarily for anyone else.

Fortunately, there are other reasons out there to be optimistic about the future of markup.