On 4/24/2018 2:12 AM, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
Sorry about typos. Giant fingers tiny screen.
Don't worry at all. That fit the conversation perfectly.
Is part of what you are identifying a
manifestation of the paradox of standards? Standard
processes say they are at heart an agreement. But if you come
along too late, the deal is done. And the standards stop being
an agreement but an imposition, even for voluntary standards
Sometimes "too late" is not the week after
ratification, but the week after the first technological
meeting!
That is part of it, a part that can certainly make things worse. At
heart, though, I'm saying that standards are themselves
paradoxical. We put tremendous amounts of effort into building
brittle boxes and workflows for ourselves and celebrate that we can
lock ourselves down so successfully that we're allowed to stop
thinking.
Except that we never stop thinking, and brittleness is not a virtue.
Thanks,
Simon
I like
these, though I think autocorrect has done some strange
things.
I'll reply as I think it it was meant, and let me know if I'm
wrong in
my guesses about the questions in addition to my answers.
(Which fits
the topic perfectly, actually!)
On 4/23/2018 12:31 AM, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> Two quickies.
>
> Shared synth good, shared semantics bad. But does a
schema really
> special syntax?
This reminds me of an angry comment from someone after a
Walter Perry
talk long ago.
"Doesn't he know that today's semantics are tomorrow's
syntax?"
It can work like that, but I don't think it has for a while.
Perhaps
we're just in a lull. I read schemas as an effort to make
that kind of
shift, but I don't see that shift happening. Or, for now,
profitable.
> Does a schema share semantics or just advertise them?
Too many people on too many projects have claimed that sharing
(and
standardizing) the meaning of things is the point of schemas.
It seems
to work better for gathering funding.
While people are certainly willing to pay for advertising, I
don't think
that is what they often claim to be doing here. Worse, we
seem to live
in a world in which we can give people advertisements and they
mistake
them for stern reality.
Schemas can absolutely be useful, but our tendency to make
them into
prisons also makes them dangerous. (And yes, people say that
XML syntax
is similarly imprisoning. I tend to disagree about that part,
but don't
worry much about convincing them any more.)
Thanks,
Simon
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