Re: [xml-dev] The Allure of Gothic Markup

["Jeremy H. Griffith" <jeremy@omsys.com>]

On Sun, 18 Aug 2013 12:03:16 -0400, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:

>I gave a talk last week at Balisage <http://balisage.net> on John 
>Ruskin's "The Nature of Gothic" and how it might transform markup (XML 
>and beyond) practice.  The talk and the paper compare and contrast 
>Ruskin, William Morris, and Christopher Alexander's visions of how 
>architecture should function with common SGML, XML, JSON, and Web practice.
>
>The value of markup is not at all that it gives us an opportunity to 
>standardize vocabularies.  That is, indeed, its curse.
>
>The value is that it lets us use shared tools to create our own kinds of 
>conversations, using a textual foundation that lets humans touch the 
>data.  Savageness and changefulness may be difficult values to adopt in 
>our vocabulary design-centric world, but they offer us perhaps our best 
>chance to repent of a direction that leads inexorably to the machine.

Excellent paper, thank you!  We're currently 
working on a new ML for tech docs, uDoc, and
I've added excepts from your quotes of Ruskin,
Morris, and Alexander to the intro to the spec.

I do hope the ideas you presented can get the 
recognition and mindshare that they obviously 
deserve.

Highly recommended!


-- Jeremy H. Griffith <jeremy@omsys.com>
   DITA2Go site:  http://www.dita2go.com/