&

["Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>]

"Odd" was the word I was probably looking for. Whatever the post was, the
word was "odd".

Len has been careful to explain to use the dangers in confuddling the
idioms, concepts, and abstract mechanisms that HumanMarkup introduces and
explores, with the HumanML interpretations, the instances, the class
diagrams, and the ambient technologies. But just as human communication is
really only defined in every exchange of soul between two beings, so the
wonders of HumanMarkup will become manifest in the information space in
which we work.

I find it hard to imagine such a project being conceived five years ago. No
Semantic Web technologies, XML in its absolute infancy, metadata folk still
arguing about what it means to title a book (well, they still are, we've
just learned to ignore them now), and so on. So I suggest that the "The
Source Code is the Specification" slogan applies, with all its
philosophical background, to HumanMarkup. I can't imagine how it could be
any other way. If we induldge ourselves in little "XML Schema vs. RELAXNG
vs. Schematron" debates, I think we can be forgiven.

Keeping that in mind, I had an epiphany minora, in reading a fairly poor
article about HumanML [1] - Jim Dunn's "Ghost in the Machine" on iSource.
XML tree structures are 1.n dimensional, but communication modes aren't.
XML is no more useful to human communication than a condom is to a
Catholic. [I applaud those of you who are singing a certain Monty Python
song at this moment.] So it's lucky that we're not building XML here, or
even an XML language. We're building something less tangiable, but no less
exciting: we're building a way of going about things, Kurt Cagle's
prophetic "taxonomy for taxonomies", Rex's insightful "*common* packages",
Manos' wonderous "roots of the ontology tree" that we're not even going to
charge for. My conclusion: the term "Markup/M" in "HumanMarkup/HumanML" is
a terrible, and indeed damaging, misnomer.

Consider the negative feedback that this group has recieved so far.
Emotions embedded in XML? Absurd, rediculous, laughable, and all the rest
of it. Consider the (actually pretty good) internet.com article entitled
"Working on a Unified Code for 'LOL' or :)" [2]. People must think that
we're a bunch of fucking idiots, or something. Lately, I have seen an
interesting reversal in this trend towards absurdity: mainly on this list,
so perhaps I'm not looking hard enough, but people are starting to "get"
HumanMarkup, and once again, I submit that the only thing to "get" about
HumanMarkup is that there is no markup.

Or is there? Now we get back to my little opening speech. The "taxonomy of
taxonomies" *has* to become manifest in markup. The problem is that I
believe that the richness of the human communicative modes are too
wide-ranging to simply write out into a little graph and say, "here you
go". We're going to be coming up with idioms that require languages more
akin to OOP to do anything with. Functions cannot be embedded in XML. They
can be represented, but not embedded. n-ary (not 3) relationships can't be
embedded in RDF. They can be modelled very efficently, but not expressed
as-is. I remember a posting from Pat Hayes on the www-rdf-logic list about
that some while ago, but can't be bothered to research the URI. I'll leave
that as a task left to the interested reader.

Which brings me to the next step in this little cavalcade of whimsy: the
hang up between documents and data. People are (aaargh!) thinking about
HumanML from a document standpoint. People on this list do the same thing,
perhaps jokingly. Ranjeeth just did it, a few posts ago:-

[[[
<suggestion>
Maybe we should eat our words, and write all our replies in XML.
Is this explicit enough?   </wink></smile>
</suggestion>
]]]
From: "Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga" <rkthunga@humanmarkup.org>
To: <humanmarkup-comment@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2001 8:26 PM
Subject: Re: Brass Tacks #3

He was joking (given by the fact that his XML wasn't even well-formed...
</wink> indeed; is that supposed to be a new form of empty tag, or what?),
but others aren't. We need to dispell these myths right away: HumanML can
add no more value to XML than a few well placed words can. Indeed, to a
skilled writer, HumanML embedded in documentation could be a hinderance
rather than an advantage. XML is not magical; elements are only different
from words in that they can delimit sections. Stop thinking in terms of
documentation and elements, and think in terms of complex and cohesive data
structures, manifest in huge databases of knowledge. Note how I'm avioding
using the term "Semantic Web" here, but that would be the gist of it, if
there weren't an unbelievable amount of odd baggage attached to that term
too. Aha, "odd".

So, what do I want? I want people to be very clear on what HumanMarkup is
and represents. It's not a human, and it's not markup :-) I want people to
have no stupid delusions about what XML can and cannot do. XML can do
anything that any language can do, just not very efficiently [3]. I think
that the goal of HumanMarkup is to investigate just how far we can push it.
That's no easy task, and perhaps I've been a bit too expectant in thinking
that we'd develop any useful implementations. Perhaps we won't. That isn't
the issue: the issue is that we're all here, working on this, learning,
contributing, experimenting, and pooling resources. The greatest threat to
that isn't that we don't produce any useful implementations, and that
hasn't really been my point. It's that if HumanMarkup loses its *way*, then
it becomes pointless. Implementations are just a measure of sticking to a
particular path.

The greatest threat to HumanMarkup is misunderstanding, which is the
epitome of ironic, given that the goal of HumanMarkup is to reduce human
misunderstanding by increasing understanding. Now, you see this one-eyed
midget, shouting the word "now". And you say, "for what reason?", and says
"how?". And you say, "what does this mean?", and he screams back, "you're a
cow. Give me some milk, or else go home."

Ah yes, "odd".

[1] http://www.isourceonline.com/article.asp?article_id=1617
[2] http://www.internetnews.com/wd-news/article/0,,10_870221,00.html
[3] You think I'm joking? XSLT is Turing Complete, so XML has the same
amount of processing power as any computer language will *ever* be able to
do, by conventional logic. But the turing completeness test is a pile of
rubbish, because it's very difficult to write Turing programs; viz. it's
difficult to get any level of abstraction to deal with what's going on.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .