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Hi B Tommie,
On Fri, 26 May 2023 08:00:43 -0400
B Tommie Usdin <btusdin@m...> wrote:
> > On May 26, 2023, at 5:51 AM, Marcus Reichardt <u123724@g...> wrote:
> > ...
>
> > I have a hard time imagining "standard writers“ (if there’s such a species)
> > who haven’t heard of XML at this point.
>
> There is such a species. Actually, there are really 2 such species; with
> significantly different characteristics, and neither of which is guaranteed
> to have heard of XML.
>
> - The vast majority of the world's standards are written as a volunteer
> effort by subject matter experts: engineers, mechanics, materials physicists,
> mechanics, biochemists, physicians, and other people with highly technical
> expertise in areas totally unrelated to the encoding of computer readable
> documents.
>
> These people are often barely literate in the use of word processors and
> if they have heard of XML are more likely to think of machine-to-machine
> information exchange than prose documents.
>
I have a hypothesis that such wilfully-ignorant, non-geeky, non-hackery, people
are becoming less influential, less attractive, and rarer:
https://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/putting-cards-on-the-table-2019-2020/indiv-nodes/selling-for-stupider-ppl.xhtml
> - The other group of "standard writers" are employees of standards
> development organizations. There are many such organizations world wide. Many
> of these people have heard of XML, have heard their counterparts talk about
> XML at conferences, think they probably should be paying attention to
> ANSI/NISO STS but are not, and have never actually seen an XML editor or and
> XML document except excerpted on a slide at a conference.
>
> These people are following the several efforts in the standards community
> to develop "smart standards". "Smart standards" is what the standards
> community is calling standards that are deeply machine processable ...
> and with a few very special exceptions they don't exist yet.
>
> These people, rightly in my opinion, are waiting to see their community
> agree on an approach to making the requirements in standards machine
> processable before committing time, money, and reputations to changing
> their word-processor based processes.
>
> BUT ... many of the people working in the publishing areas of standards
> development organizations are heads-down publishing people who support
> the volunteer efforts, guide groups of volunteers through complex
> legal/regulatory processes, clean up word processing documents, proofread
> PDF, and make publications happen using decades old processes. If these
> people have heard of XML they dismissed it as new, trendy, probably
> expensive, and unimportant.
>
--
Shlomi Fish https://www.shlomifish.org/
https://github.com/shlomif/validate-your-html - Validate Your HTML
Summer Glau can lead a horse to water, and then it will drink out of its
own volition.
— https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/facts/Summer-Glau/
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