Re: The illusion of simplicity and low cost in data designand

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From: Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@g...>
To: "Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@f...>
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2022 18:46:05 -0700

> "Open" being able to offer a choices of likely tools seems more useful
> than identifying a single application, to me at least.
>
> liam

Identifying the right set of applications (toolset) to have, depends on the level of abstraction we want to work at.

I think that neither too-low level of abstraction (the swiss-army knife) or extremely-high level of abstraction (flying in a plane) are convenient in most typical cases.

I would personally prefer a car, or even better, a bike.

Thanks,
Dimitre

On Thu, Aug 11, 2022 at 6:37 PM Liam R. E. Quin <liam@f...> wrote:

On Thu, 2022-08-11 at 22:05 +0100, Michael Kay wrote:
>
> Eric Raymond's quote would be valid if the operating system
> constrained all files to be XML, say. But it's not valid for an
> operating system that can support any file format, but can also
> reliably tell the application that it's reading an XML file rather
> than a JSON file (or more precisely, one that can identity the
> application that wrote the file and tell you what claims that
> application made about the file format).
>

MacOS (the pre-Unix OS) could do this (to some extent). It was a pain,
and made the system massively less flexible than Unix. For example, if
i make an SVG file in Inkscape (to use today's application names), i
might then want to look at it in Inkview or in a Web browser, and i
might want to edit it in Oxygen XML Editor.

Putting the applications before the documents is the wrong way round.

However, i do agree that file extensions [expletive deleted], and the Unix "file"
command (Ian Darwin of SoftQuad wrote the public domain version of
that) is incredibly useful but limited and not 100% reliable. Of
course, nothing is 100% reliable except the statement that noting is
100% reliable...

"Open" being able to offer a choices of likely tools seems more useful
than identifying a single application, to me at least.

liam

--
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

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