Markup Aesthetics and Standards
From Edd Dumbill, commenting on Apple’s latest standards faux paus:
It’s no longer enough to make your applications and hardware pretty and functional, but the guts that other people get to see must look good too.
This is one reason that people prefer RELAX NG over XML Schema, for instance. Where markup is concerned, it turns out that the excuse “only computers will read it, and we’ll provide tools to generate it” doesn’t cut it. The web’s had a view-source mentality since it started, and the aesthetics of markup matter a great deal.
This left me wondering though: what is about the aesthetics of markup that matter so much to so many of us? When people argue about RDF in general, it is typically about just this issue. Likewise when I express nervousness about using XMP in OpenDocument, that concern is only partly about more fundamental modeling issues (which I actually consider paramount), but also because XMP insists on using the more ugly aspects of RDF/XML syntax.
Why do aesthetics matter? Perhaps there is a kind o clarity in “beauty”? I know from experience it is hard to convince time-strapped developers to implement new standards, and it gets much easier to get them to do it—and to do it right—if the specs and the expected output is clear to them.
The problem with Apple’s repeated standards missteps, BTW, is not only aesthetic; it’s substantive. When applications produce XHTML that just consists of a bunch of dumb divs without any semantic coding, they are dramatically limiting the usefulness of those documents. As a user, I personally get offended when I see this sort of thing. Likewise, when companies like Apple violate basic principles of XML (their photocasting spec abuses namespaces for example), they are making life difficult not only for users, but for other developers. Not good!
Perhaps it’s time for Apple to hire a standards czar; one whose sole job is to vet all application development to ensure that it meets up to larger expectations.
Aesthetics matter, I think, because (more and more) people work with data (sharing, reusing, etc.) If it was just machines processing all the data out on the web, then aesthetics wouldn’t matter. Now, though, people want to be able to reuse data in different ways (perhaps in ways that the data’s creators/consumers didn’t even consider).
As Eric Morgan often says, “Just give me the data!” Like you said, if the structure is clear (eg, aesthetically pleasing) it makes the data much more accessible and reusable. There are enough examples of simple, well defined, structures out there (RNG, for example) that people expect this and do not want to work with anything less. I’m not an Apple user but the principle, I think, is becoming almost universal.
In addition, we’ve got more people who didn’t suck on code in their cradles who still have to design data structures, as well as work with existing ones. This means two things: they’re going to want a result they can read, and they’re not going to be patient with cruft added in to make a computer’s life easier.
Why am I saying “they”? I mean “we”! I have zero patience with XML Schema and RDF cruft.
Good points. I actually got into XML because I got frustrated enough with the tools I was using that I wanted a better way. But given that I am trained as an academic, not a programmer, I got my feet wet by looking for something I could understand how to work with … directly.
BTW, Dorothea, what about all the cruft in non-RDF XML library standards? I personally think my bibliographic data looks “nicer” in RDF than it does in MODS.
But then beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder
Eh, I’m the wrong person to ask. I’m not the world’s biggest MODS fan either. But if you feel like fanning flames, I’ll take XTM over RDF any day of the week.
You’ve mentioned topic maps before. How would you represent this sort of metadata in XTM, with what benefits over RDF? It’s a genuine question; I’ve only ever looked at XTM briefly.
FWIW, the reason I prefer RDF these days to XML formats like MODS is really just the consistent model, and that that makes it easy for me to mx-and-match different vocabularies as needed, and also to normalize my metadata through the baked-in linking support that simply works in a way that xlink doesn’t.
If XTM offers that, great!
I don’t think I was fanning flames. Was just challenging the notion that there is anything intrinsically clear about XML, or unclear about XML/RDF.