Apathetica 1.0 - For Dumber Web Developers?
First, understand this is an opinion piece. My perspective on this article is that I would very much like to keep the dream alive of a Semantic Web as an important destination.
Adrian Cooke wrote an excellent article titled X and Accessibility which provides an overview of David Andersson’s HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web published on Digital Web Magazine. After you’ve finished reading both (because this is really about neither but also about both of them) then come back and continue. Maybe. Hopefully.
In the comments of Adrian’s post, Ian Hickson, the force behind HTML5, mentioned his perspective on the machine-understandable web and conceded HTML5 isn’t the silver bullet for that paradigm.
HTML5 won’t get us all the way to a completely machine-understandable Web, but it’s not clear to me that that’s an important destination. I think a human-readable and human-writable Web is a much more critical destination, and that’s the focus HTML5 takes. I think a much better way of getting a computer-understandable Web would be to make the computers understand the current Web. I think it’s going to be much easier to get computers to understand humans than it would be to get humans to understand how to write computer-understandable content like RDF, let alone motivating most humans to actually write such content.Ian Hickson
My ears pricked up when he said, and I’ll pull the line out again, I think a much better way of getting a computer-understandable Web would be to make the computers understand the current Web
. From my perspective, I would like a machine-understandable Web where computers can communicate with computers, and that would mean a Semantic Web. The larger context of that sentence should be discussed. What difficulties would there be to making computers understand the current Web?
In short, a strict syntax and an agreement on both ends of a computer conversation will make for easier interoperability. Computers aren’t smarter than us, that’s just a mental model we put onto dumb CPUs with limited instruction sets processing 1’s and 0’s. Put a jumble of crap into that processing sequence and it gets exponentially more difficult to achieve a common meaning from sender to recipient - areas of Artificial Intelligence computer science like natural language understanding give a good idea about the complexities of flexible human communication. So, its naive to believe that this can be solved simply by Babel Fish processing during the mid-communication process between disparate languages. Cumbersome, slow and probably impossible.
However, I agree it’s also naive to believe we’ll ever make a web where content writers will be motivated to learn strict syntax computer languages. That will never happen. But I can’t see the dumbing down to meet the Flickr case study on alt attributes in the name of generality is an overly bright solution. Most people write invalid unsemantic crap code and by the law of generality being espoused throughout that conversation we might as well just lower the bar to suit that general user, too. Why demand validity at all? Hey we could just have tolerant browsers (now that’s a circular conversation).
What I’d really hate to see in 10 years time is just a zippier version of the Web we know today. I’d like to have a Web that was nothing like the one I imagine, even as a technologist. A Semantic Web with meaning would be a big part of that vision - regardless of HTML5. The next frontier, after all, isn’t the mere cataloguing of information. The frontier is in context. Combine that context with the ability for machines to talk widely to other machines and interoperable applications and we’re talking a lot bigger than just better more meaningful HTML for the developer.
Hey, another idea. How about looking at what might be done by a mom and pop web designer who didn’t give a shite about standards - basic stuff like insert images and left align text. How about providing a basic easy way for most things to be achieved (which we can verily ignore). Call it Apathetica 1.0, a language for the inert developer. If someone wants to be an inert developer but produce real products then “learn the new stricter language”? Does that make sense? Let’s stop seeing the generalised shite coder as the base model for web development technologies - hey Apathetica 1.0 will be fun. you might even teach it to children before they learn the real way of doing things. Then the rest of us can get on with developing some meaningful (not about knitting or poodles) web applications. Who’s with me on the Apathetica 1.0 thing? Great, 1 of me. As expected. I might get a t-shirt made or something.
Apathetica 1.0, living the dream!
OK I’ve diverged and I apologise. As if there’s not already enough to read here. I just thought it worth commenting that I think Ian’s comment was over-simplistic in its expectation of the computer’s ability to deal with the situation, as opposed to the developer (that’s another thing, user means developer not website user)! Basically, computers can be really smart at some things and really dumb at others. Now I’ll oink and turn in three circles and stop. Enjoy your weekend.
