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Kimbro Staken exploring creative use of technology and whatever else happens to seem interesting.
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Standards in microcontent publishing
Evan Prodromou has posted what I guess can be considered a call to action in regard to microformats and RDFa. Those are clearly two ways of solving the problem of microcontent publication, with RDFa bringing all the weight of RDF along with it. Evan’s concern is that they’ll end up competing and slowing the adoption of the technology. Probably a legitimate concern given the history of other recent W3C killer specs like XQuery and XML Schema. It actually makes me cringe to think about the presence of a W3C spec in this area. I think XQuery was the worst thing that could have happened to XML databases, it basically killed innovation and the stupid thing still isn’t done.
Microcontent publication is a new area, ripe for innovation and it’s WAY TOO EARLY to worry about standards. Standards will just ramp up the complexity and kill innovation. I keep seeing the argument that RSS and HTML became such a mess because there were no standards or whatever. I just don’t buy that as a problem. The only thing that matters in both of those cases is that they were both successful, broadly successful, hugely successful, massively successful in a way that almost no standardized technology has ever been successful. Are they a mess now? Yeah sure I suppose you could argue that, but so what! At least we got to the point where it actually makes sense to worry about that. If RSS had been based on a committee designed standard for syndication it would have never succeeded. And that isn’t just theory, there were committee designed specifications for that exact thing before RSS existed and now I can’t even remember what they were called.
As technologists we tend to get caught up in trying to avoid mistakes, and we look at things like RSS and HTML in retrospect and think of all the ways things could have been done better technically. However, in doing that we also tend to forget or simply miss the reason that we’re even in a position to look back on the successful technologies. So here’s my message to the other technologists working in this space. Ignore your desire for standards, it’s too early. The path to success is paved with published microcontent, real world microcontent. The format of the microcontent is unimportant, what’s important is that it simply exists, that people are actually publishing stuff in some structured form. Any structured form is better than no structured form. Once that happens and people are used to the idea and there’s at least some value there, then we can worry about real standards to take it to the next level. For now even the Microformats effort is almost pushing things in my opinion.
And I’ll also say this, if microcontent publishing requires people to understand anything about RDF, it’s game over, kaput, fini, forget about it. RDF is what eight, nine years old now and there’s still only a very small handful of people who actually understand it. Hmm, maybe there’s a reason for that. So put your resources, reifications and ontologies on the ground and take a step back.
It’s going to be a rowdy and wild time on the microcontent frontier and that’s just how it should be. So grab your six shooters, free your mind and shootdown the standards. Yee Haw!
This entry was posted by Kimbro Staken on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 4:39 pm and is filed under XML, Microcontent, Microformats, Structured Blogging. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.
June 1st, 2006 at 8:40 am
Although I disagree with you about the utility of RDF (really, it’s a lot easier than it looks. why it hasn’t been picked up, I don’t know), in the end it’s not really important.
What matters is getting the machine readable data out there - once it’s marked up properly it’s comparatively trivial to convert it to whatever format you like the best.
June 2nd, 2006 at 10:22 am
Yep, that’s all that matters. Once there’s enough data out there we can worry about standards. Until then that’s just premature optimization.
June 2nd, 2006 at 11:23 am
[…] This is from an email I wrote to clarify my concerns with the existence of RDFa. It was in response to an email prompted by my post on the premature creation of standards in the microcontent space. I had looked at RDFa and I agree it’s not all that complicated, in fact RDF as a basic technology isn’t really that complicated. Where RDF fails is the semantic web vision and the complexity pulled in by trying to build a globally scalable data framework. To me that’s too aggressive of an approach for real world adoption. Anyone who actually gets out in the field and works with average skill level developers will know that a disturbingly large percentage are still struggling with simple XML, let alone the ideas behind RDF. The RDF vision is great and I don’t dispute the theoretical value of it, my problem with it is born 100% from the fact that I just don’t believe it can succeed outside the realm of the above average skill level developers who are already interested in it. That’s basically been my opinion since I read the early working drafts for the RDF specs and I’ve seen nothing since then that’s allowed me to think otherwise. I’m always looking. […]
June 6th, 2006 at 9:41 am
One small nit. The problem with RSS hasn’t been so much to do with standardization - at this point in time RSS 2.0 pretty well is the de facto standard. The problem is with the nature of its specification.
Arguably there was a better one (RSS 1.0), designed by a commitee no less. But irrespective of that, because of the numerous shortfalls of RSS, a significant number of syndication developers had little option but to develop a new specification, Atom. Technically, RSS itself could have been fixed, but the specification process didn’t allow for it.
I’ll add that the situation with RSS is very different to that of HTML. When HTML came along no-one really had a clue about best practices for interoperability (there wasn’t a Web). This wasn’t the case when RSS came along, best practices had emerged. But then sloppiness was rebadged as “simple” and hailed as a virtue.
June 13th, 2006 at 7:33 am
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