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Re: RE: Why is there little usage of XML on the "visibleWeb"?

• To: davep@d...
• Subject: Re: RE: Why is there little usage of XML on the "visibleWeb"?
• From: jim.fuller@r...
• Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 19:55:49 +0100
• Cc: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>, xml-dev@l...

Dave Pawson wrote ..
> On Mon, 2006-07-17 at 18:43 -0400, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
>
> >
> > ASSERTION #7
> >
> >
> >
> > “The more a piece of knowledge becomes available, the more valuable
> it
> > potentially becomes, because of the wider array of possible uses for
> > it.”
>
> Yet the better marked up it is, the wider its potential (re)application?

'better' is a word up for interpretation.

'my messy desk is the epitomy of customisation for its one single user...anyone else attempting to decipher the bits of paper and other detritus will quickly be confounded by the end user's intent. I think its better for me.'

I guess i wouldnt want to be slinging my desk as an object around a network...the point in this absurd analogy is that markup is fundamentally about communicating to 'others' intended meaning with respect structure (presentation) and content?

As all our personal intended meanings collasce and compose we get tacit 'agreement' on such diverse things as calenders and rpc protocols.

the power in XML as the 'lingua franca' is directly related to number of nodes and interconnectedness (as well as users consuming, which I think this thread alludes too). It is still a bit of a mystery to me where the 'interconnectedness' comes from whilst we still lack adoption of a language for relating one XML document to another, but of course that is another perma thread.

So markup is good (and as David says can be 'better') but does *more* markup gaurentee more meaning (and value)? I think not, when we layer too much meaning and structure over content...the human mind has a tracking limit (something Agatha Christi knew when creating more then 9 characters in a mystery novel) which most marketing folk are aware off....I think for most normal people dealing with more then 5 things ( 5 of a kind, 5 different things, etc...) starts to overload the system for deriving meaning. Its something we all subliminally perform when looking at obsfucated XML or why we keep our emacs terminal windows small.

Perhaps consumption of XML by people or machines is what is being refered to in this thread ...I for one would like to think that 90% of XML processing is invisible for a reason...machines are generating and processing it...one just has to think about making maps (i once participated in assisting in making the gravity map for the state of Rhode Island) to understand that you want to be an end user of such processes reading a map and making suppositions based on the nicely presented data.

In any event, it is also understandable that we want to think of both web services and the web as the same thing, e.g. XML document messaging. Hopefully, the machines will let us escape an ampersand, every once in a while, for sometime to come.

sorry for the length of this, going to bed now!

cheers, Jim Fuller

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