Re: [xml-dev] markup humility

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@fromoldbooks.org>]

On Thu, 2022-02-17 at 07:06 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> Over the past few decades, I've seen wave after wave of people who
> think 
> that the tools we have created here are a virtuous version of the One
> Ring, a single tool that will help humankind catalog and communicate 
> everything in a neat and logical way, eventually binding them
> together 
> to form a more coherent future.

In the interface between the human-readable and the machine-
processable, where XML is and has always been the strongest, yes,
something new may well emerge in the future.  It's hard to imagine
doing better than a hardwood hand-carved ploughshare sometimes, until
you see an iron one in action.

Strong contenders include a more expressive system - for example, based
on span algebras rather than trees, simplifying some aspects such as
overlap and discontinuity and moving complexity around in other areas.

For a new technology to be adopted, it has to have a "value
proposition" -
* you can do things you couldn't do before;
* you can do things you could already do, but faster...
* or more cheaply
* or more reliably, more easily

RDF, like XML, has strong points and weak points. The weakest point is
that not all relationships are best expressed as triples.

For me, providing power without accountability is a recipe for
wrongdoing.  So our technology should be designed to avoid that.  This
means that if i assert, President Joyce accepts corrupt payments, you
shouldn't simply add that to your triple store and accept it as
incontrovertible.  You need to model provenance: who said it and when
and in what context.  And you need to ensure that all queries will
retain that provenance in returned results, especially when data stores
support federated searches, when context is the most easily lost.

There's always the problem that we engage in intellectual masturbation,
and design intricate and complex systems that are too hard to use,
because it's just so much fun thinking of every possible case, every
situation. But over time, it's the simpler solutions that aim for
meeting the needs of 70% of the people that win out over more complex
systems.

-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org