A Bet: Lightweight vs. Heavyweight
Ernie Prabhakar (of OpenDarwin) and I have been going back and forth on the future of document standards. Ernie is of the belief that the future lies in lightweight solutions like XHTML + microformats. I am generally a proponent of heavyweight solutions like DocBook, OpenDocument, and RDF. While I believe the lightweight solutions have their place (primarily as output/display formats), I simply don’t think they have much hope of solving the deep problems I really care about (smarter documents, better interoperability, long-term viability, etc.). I certainly see no hope of authoring my academic documents in them.
So Ernie made the conversation interesting by proposing a bet. We’ve gone back and forth on the language, but I hope he’s comfortable with settling on this:
By January 1st, 2010 more technical documents will be authored in XHTML + microformats than using any mix of DocBook or OpenDocument and RDF?
Loser pays for dinner at Chevy’s in San Francisco.
This is just a friendly bet, of course (and there would no doubt be complications in actually defining what we mean by “technical documents,” etc.). The question is really whether the future of serious document production will be with the lightweight solutions, or the heavyweight solutions. Will the future be a world where microformats dominate and RDF is left in the dust, or vice versa? Or perhaps (as I think much more likely) there’ll be a draw, and both will have their roles?
I wonder how others would wager?
I’m not willing to make a bet, but I would like to see your current academic authoring workflow!
No you wouldn’t Rich!
It’s in an absolute state of disarray. I’ve still yet to convert all my data to an RDF representation I’m happy with, and therefore I also haven’t upgraded citeproc to handle it, nor even figured out how!
Still looking for help on that last one …
I don’t think there’s any question both will have their roles. Microformats don’t strike me as very useful for technical writing until the validation issue is worked out. Without working out the metrics, I’m not sure how to judge the results, but I don’t think XHTML is going to replace DocBook/DITA/TEI etc. in serious technical writing.
I’d take a piece of that bet, contingent on reasonable definitions of the metrics.
Arg, where am I going to find the time?
The reason I ask is that I’ve got a thesis on the way, and — much as I love LyX — I’d like other options.
I authored my book using DocBook NG, storing the bib metadata as MODS in an XML DB, and using citeproc to format it.
In my case, though, I had to be able to provide the manuscript in something that Word can ingest. For a thesis you have no such requirements. Given that and given your fileld, I’d tend to say a LaTeX solution may be a better solution.
Still, if you want to try the bleeding edge, I could see adapting citepro (or something similar) to use SPARQL to grab the bib data.
I’m definitely on Ernie’s side of this bet. And he’s in the lead. Look at the uptake already of COinS (http://www.furl.net/item.jsp?id=5305118) and OpenURL (http://www.furl.net/item.jsp?id=5305059) for academic citation. They are already implemented by a number of sites (including CiteULike) and they employ lightweight technologies like bookmarklets and greasemonkey to munge the HTML in which they are embedded in. See http://www.furl.net/item.jsp?id=5350271 .
Hi Nick — our bet is about authoring though. No author I know uses any of that, and I certainly wouldn’t for anything serious.
In fact, if you look at how most publishers work, they typically request — quite specifically — MS Word documents. In the case of my book manuscript that is just about to hit the streets, my contract says just that, in fact.
I ultimately gave them XHTML documents because my production editor was tech-savvy and a good guy, but the source was still DocBook and MODS XML. I just generated the XHTML (+citation microformats actually) via XSLT.
As Norm, notes, it all depends on how you define the metrics, but if you take all published technical books, I’d venture almost none are now authored in XHTML. The majority would be in either DocBook (or something similar), LaTeX, or Word.
Bruce,
I’m make the bet for a better restaurant. In a city with hundreds of world-famous haute cuisine restaurants, why would you want to eat a Chevy’s?
I plead ignorance. I think Ernie was looking for a location near likely conference spots.
Thanks for the clarification re “authoring” vs. publishing, because it made me think much harder about the issue. I’ll still back Ernie’s side of the bet, but on reflection the five year time frame seems very tight. See my full response at http://radio.weblogs.com/0126951/2005/10/31.html#a196 .
[...] I recently posted here regarding standards and libraries, specifically the need for lightweight APIs/formats for use in various projects. I also mentioned an article over at darcus blog regarding light vs complex, and there is even a bet that lightweight will win over heavyweight. While that can be debated, there is definitely a place for lightweight implementations. [...]