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Monday, October 31, 2005

It's not just Light vs. Heavy; It's Dynamic vs. Static.

This entry is my response to an interesting thread spun out of a bet about the future of markup languages. It can be read standalone, but is probably easier to follow if you read the bet and the thread first.

I believe that we will all author in something much closer to XHTML+microformats than we author in DocBooks or WordML or TeX, because the former better enables Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the two-way web: a web whose "interactive content" can be immediately edited using the same basic tools for browsing as for editing. I think the traditional "batch style" of authoring and publishing using "compiled markup languages" is giving way to the "interactive style" of authoring and publishing using "dynamic markup languages". [While "compiled markup language" seems to be in use, there does not yet appear to be any discussion of compiled vs. dynamic markup languages. So this may be the first.]

The batch style is exemplified by the phrase "WYSIWYG": What You See Is What You Get. What has been compiled for rendering is what you get--take it or leave it. To put it more pejoratively "What You See Is What You Are Stuck With." The interactive style is exemplified by WYSIWYE ("What You See Is What You Edit"). [For about five minutes, I was pleased with myself for having of this succinctly insightful term; until I Googled it and got 200+ hits. Oh well, its still a great alternative term for Tim Berners-Lee's read write web.]

So...because I believe that eventually we will be able to edit and annotate and cut and paste everything we SEE on the web, this leads me to believe that the language used to present such information will be the language we use to author it as well. Note that we may still use fancy WYS editors for authoring. But the author's mental model of the underlying representation will be based on a dynamic markup language.

Blogs and wikis are heading in this direction. Few blog or wiki writers author in Word and then publish in XHTML. Instead, they author while thinking in much more HTML-native ways. For example, they use pidgen HTML markup languages (==header==) and viewers that can toggle between cooked (rendered) and raw views. Or go back even further when we used to author in long hand and a WP specialist would reproduce it in electronic format. Now almost all writers are expected to author in electronic format.

So for me, the interesting question is: What will tomorrow's "dynamic markup language" look like? I'm betting it's going to look a lot more like today's XHTML+microformats than today's compiled markup languages", e.g., DocBooks, WordML, Postscript, TeX. (Note: I think a similar dialectic is happening between dynamic programming languages and compiled programming languages for similar reasons, i.e., the transition to WYRIWYE--What You Run Is What You Edit.)

The other interesting question is how quickly will dynamic markup languages and the WYSIWYE interactive document lifecycle displace compiled markup languages and the WYSIWYG batch document lifecycle? Unfortunately, technical writing, which is often expected to be published and not changed much thereafter, e.g., academic journals, is probably the last form of writing to follow this trend. The biggest determinant of the pace of such change will be the change in thinking about academic collaboration. It's already changing with preprint archives like arXiv. The lines between preprint, print, and postprint are blurring because the relationships between the peer review process and the publishing process are in flux. However, given the pace of such cultural changes, I think five years is very optimistic--but still possible.


3:33:34 PM      

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