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

[David Lee <dlee@calldei.com>]

My personal (today) opinion is that the Gothic Romance is over romantisized.
Those "flying buttresses" were added decades or centuries later because the cathedral was going to fall down,
but later were viewed as part of the art ...

Plus comparing architecture to markup I think is a catwalk.
Architecture has to follow natures laws ... those are implicit ... The building has to hold up to gravity and decay and use.
Those things are a given.  But to compare to XML with schema ... I would argue that Schema is the natural law.
It imposes those things which have to be upheld  ( the building still stands under gravity,  it can hold a congregation of X, 
it has a ceiling hight of Y , the walls dont fall down, it costs less then $X)   It keeps the tempature above YdegC .. It doesnt stink of mold.

To claim an equivalence to gothic architecture and schema-less XML to me seems nonsensical.	

Surely there is a range of constraints .... but to claim gothic architecture had no constraints is just plain silly.
If it had no constraints it would be a Escher painting, not a building.





----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy H. Griffith [mailto:jeremy@omsys.com] 
Sent: Sunday, August 18, 2013 3:36 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] The Allure of Gothic Markup

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/

_______________________________________________________________________

XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS
to support XML implementation and development. To minimize
spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting.

[Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/
Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@lists.xml.org
subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@lists.xml.org
List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php