Tuesday, August 12, 2003

European Commission may create a task force to plan for fire prevention across the Continent. [Christian Science Monitor | World] If Europe was already very concerned with global warming, this will raise the alarm several notches. The proximate causes may include mismanagement, underinvestment, and archaic land use and ownership systems, aided and abetted by a Common Agricultural Policy that preserves untenable arrangements. But there is accumulating evidence for increasingly extreme weather. 8:21:28 PM

Great piece by Tim Bray that explains how designers should use XML. He describes the Worse Is Better school of XML format design. The names we use for elements are the worst-possible names, but they allow our software to interoperate. Namespaces create elements with names with colons in them [Scripting News] It looks more and more as if standard development for the Web has been thoroughly poisoned by metaphysics, from the Semantic Web to XML name spaces, trying to define precisely what names mean independently of their use. Of all people, programmers should be the least susceptible to this poison, living as they do in a world in which the meaning of bits is just their causal role in computation. An exceptionally perceptive colleague suggests that these repeated slides into ontological nonsense in linguistics, artificial intelligence, and now Web standards may be hazards of an evolutionarily-supplied classification faculty that is quite efficient for managing information about natural kinds, but fails miserably for socially constructed terms. 10:48:00 AM