Tim Bray: XML was frozen and published in February 1998. As it came toward the end and it became obvious -- well, not obvious, but likely anyhow -- that this was going to get a lot of momentum, we were besieged by requests for extra features of one kind or another. We basically lied and told the world, we would do all that stuff in version 2. You have to shoot the engineers and ship at some point, right? I think there will never be an XML version 2. There is an XML version 1.1, but it's controversial and not widely supported.
Dave Winer: Emphatically, that XML is frozen is a good thing. If it were a moving target nothing would get done. And the same is true of RSS.
Randy: Everybody wants their spec to be frozen. Everybody wants to rewrite everybody elses spec. Who wins? Tech consulting firms like IBM, who hire out consultants to solve the problems caused by the proliferation of specs. Which, BTW, IBM is most responsible for creating. If only the Ses in SOAP and RSS stood for simple.
Randy