Right on. The XML world gets crazier and crazier, adding complexity until nobody can understand or adopt it.[Aaron Swartz]
This was in response to Dave Winer's article today on XML. Now, at first I mis-understood part of Dave's story, this part in particular:
The hard work is unlocking the power for masses of people, people who couldn't care less about ontologies, or semantic webs, or even accessibility.A quick email exchange with Dave put me straight and I should have read it as:
The hard work is unlocking the power for masses of people, people who couldn't care less about ontologies, or semantic webs, or even the technology of accessibility.Bold words are my addition, and read that way I agree with Dave, the vast majority of people just want the web to work and really don't care about the underlying technology.
I disagree with Dave's pointing a vauge finger at 'academics' purportedly looking down their noses. Vague because he doesn't define who he is talking about specifically nor does he mention particular offending behaviours.
The discussion does raise a good question about complexity, where do you draw the line for what is too complex? From the first day I learned about XML I loved it because I saw immediate applications of it to solve problems I faced on daily basis. XML 1.0 is easy to understand and use. CSS applied to HTML or XML is also very clean and straght forward to me. XML namespaces make complete sense to me but I have observed in my treks around blogland and newsgroups that they aren't as obvious and intuitive to everybody. Moving into the newer and higher level recommendations coming from the W3C I start to feel a bit lost. I very carefully read the RDF Primer yet I am still at a loss to explain what I could use it for. Should I just dismiss it as a Don't Worry specification like Joel would have me do?
No. I will go back to the specification and related articles slowly over time. I didn't really see a need for CSS when I first learned HTML, but as I maintained some web sites over time and bumped my head enough times on having mark-up embedded in my content which made it difficult, if not impossible, to deploy a new look and feel to site without having to edit every page, I suddenly had a real need for CSS. I still have a lot to learn, still more head bumping to do, and I want to have RDF, SVG, SMIL, and all the rest in my pocket when those days come.
Mark has posted his third accessibility vignette.