Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: Paul Prescod <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 21:38:03 -0500
"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> 
> At 02:54 PM 4/28/99 -0500, you wrote:
> >You are missing an important part of Guy's argument. In some cases you the
> >consumer have a choice of only the dumbed-down information or none at all.
> >The W3C has no hope of changing the business model of these companies and
> >it is highly debatable whether they should be trying.
> 
> If that's genuinely the case, it seems that XML has been grossly oversold
> as cure for the problems of the Web.  

The W3C creates technologies to *enable* more exciting, powerful uses of
the Web. They cannot *require* that people use their technologies or use
them properly.

> I find it highly ironic that XSL,
> with its transformations and formatting objects, is so readily capable of
> blocking the move toward a meaningful Web that XML was supposed to provide.

Data-dumbing has been going on since there was CGI. Now companies have the
choice to send out smart data. Some will choose to do so. Some will choose
to charge money for that service. That is a major step forward.

> We already have advertisements, which seem to occupy about 50% of my Web
> visits. If selling semantics is going to be a viable business model, we'd
> better get back to those micropayments...

I agree! Micropayments are an important part of the solution.

There is a subtletly that we are passing over here. When a client sends me
information in their corporate DTD it takes me about half a day to wrap my
head around it enough to be able to do something useful with it. You can't
throw it into a search engine or word processor and expect to be able to
do anything useful with it. To make it useful, either the customer or I
must map it to some more generally known data model -- either a display
data model like FOs, or a search model.

What that means is that forcing (even by law!) corporations to expose
their internal data would not move us toward a semantically searchable web
unless those corporations or some third party went through aa complex
process of structure-mapping. In other words, the semantic web can only be
built if corporations choose to build business models that support it. It
doesn't happen just by exposing the underlying data.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

"Microsoft spokesman Ian Hatton admits that the Linux system would have
performed better had it been tuned."
"Future press releases on the issue will clearly state that the research
was sponsored by Microsoft."
  http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/enterprise/1999/9904221410.asp


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