Re: HumanMarkup Reservations

[cagle@olywa.net (Kurt Cagle)]

> It's our job, as TC members, to make sure that the concepts that have been
> rasied in Phase 0, and that form the foundations for all future
HumanMarkup
> work, are manfest as efficiently as possible given the current
> developmental environment that we have. It just so happens that we have a
> WWW, XML, Schemata, RDF, SW, VRML, and a whole load of experts on them all
> in one place. We're bound to have mini-disasters somewhere, if not big
> ones; but at least they'll be cool :-)

I'll second that. I'm also going to go out on a bit of a limb here. Schemas
are evolutionary, and are shaped by requirements. They are also far from
static, until such time as you basically stamp the current version with a
1.0 so that they can be used as benchmarks for future evolution. The
thinking that I've seen in my first (admittedly cursory) read of the
documents has been heavily shaped by psychologists view. It is valid,
certainly, and may in fact be absolutely perfect in describing that
particular domain. However, there are areas where other domain experts
(those involved in online gaming, those involved in e-commerce, those
involved in relational maps, etc.) may look at the standard as it exists now
and feel it doesn't meet their needs. These documents will likely change ...
a great deal ... in response to that, and the result will be something that
nobody really totally likes but that everyone will at least grudgingly
admits provides the groundwork for their own development work.

I apologize if I'm treading on old wounds that have somewhat healed, but it
is precisely at those old wounds that the most significant action takes
place. To jump metaphors back to the one Len was using, you may have built
the most beautiful cathedral in the world on a site, but if what was really
needed there was an office building then, yes, it may be worth tearing it
down some and re-examining old assumptions.

-- Kurt