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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Ted Nelson's "XML is Evil"
 On Sep 30, 2004, at 8:30 PM, Tim Bray wrote: > I disagree with virtually every technical argument Ted Nelson has ever > made and (in most cases) the implementations are on my side, but it > doesn't matter; Ted's place in history is secure because he asked more > important questions than just about anybody. I think he usually > offered the wrong answers, but questions are more important. -Tim I think it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. It might be fairer to say that many of the things Ted Nelson thinks are important tend to fall outside the scope of things XML is very good for. Certainly the question of the technically correct way to do persistent linking, annotations etc. in XML documents (or the WWW in general, for that matter) is still open to debate, despite HyTime, TEI, XLink etc. etc. and Ted's model in Xanadu at least provided a fairly clear solution (which at one level or other, many of the other things emulate). Also, if anything, the model (both implementation and user) people typically have for word processors argues for something closer to Ted's model (though there is a trend toward more structured processing... a good trend too in many ways). I personally think the node-centric processing model that almost everyone thinks is the *correct* processing model for XML is fairly limiting, and doesn't jive with a lot of the processing I have done on XML over the years, just as the notion of validity, and to a lesser degree, well-formedness don't reflect processing reality in all cases either. I guess I don't see the conflict between Ted's model and everyone else's so clearly... the fundamental model is, if anything, a superset of pretty much everything we've done with a heavy emphasis on user interpretation and reuse of information. The main disagreement I have is that his ideal case requires a closed system (or universal adoption, which is the same thing at a different level) in order to provide guarantees. I think we've learned that that is an unreasonable expectation, but you could argue that a lot of the benefit of most web technologies is not from the technology, but rather the network effects engendered by widespread adoption. Still, I wouldn't have spent as much time as I did in standards groups, and I'm sure, neither would have most people, if we didn't believe there was a (technical) benefit in doing so. The discussion of archival is interesting, because that was one of core uses for XML/SGML in the early days... certainly, a lot of my interest stemmed from archival-ish uses. 
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