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
Nothing to contribute to this discussion other than note of another example of XLink playing a seemingly significant role:
XLink is important to the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard Standard (METS) utilized by libraries and museums and other institutions maintaining digital repositories. Given the variety of descriptive metadata encoding standards (to facilitate discovery) for digital objects, METS provides encoding to handle this and the variety of other purposes of metadata (e.g. preservation). XLink seems to play an important role in its schema for links to descriptive metadata schema and file locations of digital object components.
Not a user, have just read the literature. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/mets-schemadocs.html
regards,
Dana Pearson
dbpearsonmlis.com
Hi Folks,
On July 29, 2009 Michael Kay wrote:
As far as I am aware, XPointer
is not being pursued either by
standards groups or by implementors.
What about XLink, is it being pursued by either standards groups or by implementors?
/Roger
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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]
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2009 7:30 PM
To: 'Kurt Cagle'; 'Michael Kay'
Cc: 'Louis Matherne'; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] XPointer is dead.
What about XLink?
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
Louis:
I have been careful to use the qualifier of common practice which one can quantify as the aggregate of system type (email, document editors, spreadsheets, visual analytics (maps) etc )clusters on desktops.
Of the kinds of information types you list, how many can not be done using relational dbs (SQL) and common three tier systems and how many users need to do those things?
Of those that are left, how many are best done with XBRL for some given metric of better?
Of those, how many implementations are there in open source and how many are serviced?
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Louis
Matherne [mailto:matherne@optonline.net]
Sent: Friday,
August 28, 2009 9:19 AM
To:
xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: RE:
[xml-dev] XPointer is dead. What about XLink?
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]
Sent: Thursday,
August 27, 2009 7:30 PM
To: 'Kurt
Cagle'; 'Michael Kay'
Cc: 'Louis
Matherne'; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: RE:
[xml-dev] XPointer is dead. What about XLink?
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