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Len, It’s certainly true that “humans read the stuff” and largely
expect to receive it in a manner that’s easy to use – many still prefer the
print version. Much of this is dependent on the nature of the information.
Information that is largely narrative in nature is less dependent on links to
other resources to be complete (although I can spend hours on hours reading
something online that takes me down many other paths through links). Contrast this with financial information that is highly
structured and metric based and you might come to a different conclusion.
There may be a lot of words with financial information but those words are
usually carefully selected to report a required disclosure. As such,
there is a vibrant global industry that creates, aggregates, disaggregates,
normalizes, massages, analyzes, and redistributes this information. At
the end, the ‘human still needs to be able to read this stuff” but they aren’t
reading a book. They are reading comparative metrics and other analyzes
in an application (think spreadsheet here) that is far more dependent on the
ability to pull together multiple sources of information. In this
scenario, XBRL is just the plumbing that the end user cares little about, but
this plumbing ties it into the city utilities as opposed to a well and septic
system. Louis Matherne From: Len Bullard
[mailto:cbullard@hiwaay.net] Those technologies don’t get traction I think because for most
common practice uses of XML they aren’t that useful. Most useful
related office data is stored relationally. As Tim Bray observes, XML thrives as bits on the wires. As a
representation most programmers can schlep in and out of RAM as documents, it’s
ok. Most common uses can use microformats for the longer lived
semantically loaded bits because microformats track the average information
density of tables. Wise URI management does the rest. If you
need a doc of links, you usually have a table of contents or the reverse index
which is fine because those are where some of the ideas in XPointer and XLInk
originate as well as glosses/annotations. Very complex abstractions of semantically loaded data can be
fascinating to think about, but what practical desktop uses are made of
them? I’m not saying they don’t exist, but where they exist in the
information ecosystem, what other systems are their dependent neighbors? Humans read the stuff. Documents work. As a
result, the most frequent user of the system doesn’t use XPointer or
XLink. They don’t care. No care: no market. len |