Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
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
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] |
