Re: HTML6

On 7 January 2013 20:18, Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Oscar Godson,
>
> Greetings. The onset of HTML 5.1 is a good time to discuss new ideas and
> concepts for HTML.
>
> (1) What do you think about Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML)?
>
> (2) What do you think about GUI widgets-based approaches to documents in
> the context of document authoring software such as iBooks Author 2.0, Adobe
> Edge Animate, Visual Web Developer, or other IDE's?
>
> (3) What do you think about HTML templates (
> http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw-file/tip/spec/templates/index.html
> )?
>
> (4) What do you think about IS&R into multimedia widgets-based documents,
> and bookmarking or opening such documents to specific configurations?
>
> Also, as an aside, there is a Web Philosophy Community Group (
> http://www.w3.org/community/philoweb/), and, with regard to your
> indication that "the web is moving towards a giant app store and we need to
> embrace it", some contributors here may have other ideas, ideas about other
> models of the Web.
>
> The remainder of this letter broaches a reaction to your claim that "the
> web is moving towards a giant app store and we need to embrace it" and
> presents an invitation to additionally participate in the Web Philosophy
> Community Group.
>
> In the context of digital documents, books and textbooks, when I hear app
> store, I think about concerns; concerns that the public may have. Concerns
> about syndicates, quasi-government organizations, nationalist agendas, and
> conspiracies reaching into the highest levels of government.
>
> Some Americans have concerns that all but political scientists are
> underinformed about what some bureaucrats' agendas might be with regard to
> the Web, behind a facade of some telepersonable Democrats in the White
> House. The current administration presides over an almost Ford-era
> executive branch which includes new organizations forged on an anvil of
> fascism with a hammer of terror.
>
> In the current political climate, in the present day United States of
> America, some allege that there exist various partisan, bipartisan and
> nonpartisan interest groups and lobbying organizations interested in the
> content of documents, books and textbooks, interested in information
> available to the public, information in the news, and information on the
> Web.
>
> Americans have concerns about state participation in what some refer to as
> a ghastly molecule of information corporatism. For example, there are a few
> contentious topics pertaining to American history, social studies, and the
> years of the George W. Bush administration. Some such topics which were a
> part of a Texastbooks controversy (
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/17/AR2010031700560.html).
> Many Americans have opinions, including about a wider set of
> content-related topics, and a free marketplace, with a diverse set of
> products, and distributed, decentralized consumer processes, by elected and
> well-informed schoolboards, is how we do things in the United States of
> America.
>
> Many Americans are still somewhat upset about when a syndicate tried to
> indicate that digital textbooks should be sold to schoolboards across the
> United States of America via a centralized app store model. Many Americans
> are somewhat upset about sponsored stories in places of socialization, free
> speech and assembly.
>
> Summarily, beyond hypertext, HTML 5, 5.1, 5.2 and 6 topics, there are
> available other forums, including at least one Community Group for
> discussion about Web philosophy (http://www.w3.org/community/philoweb/).
> Your claims that "the web is moving towards a giant app store and we need
> to embrace it" can be discussed there. Here, however, we collegially
> discuss hypertext technologies, for example points (1), (2), (3) and (4).
>

The web was designed to be a data ecosystem, rather than, an application
ecosystem.  I think we can achieve a happy medium where both concepts can
live together.  (see below)

Principle of Least Power

In choosing computer languages, there are classes of program which range
from the plainly descriptive (such as Dublin Core metadata, or the content
of most databases, or HTML) though logical languages of limited power (such
as access control lists, or conneg content negotiation) which include
limited propositional logic, though declarative languages which verge on
the Turing Complete (Postscript is, but PDF isn't, I am told) through those
which are in fact Turing Complete though one is led not to use them that
way (XSLT, SQL) to those which are unashamedly procedural (Java, C).

The choice of language is a common design choice. The low power end of the
scale is typically simpler to design, implement and use, but the high power
end of the scale has all the attraction of being an open-ended hook into
which anything can be placed: a door to uses bounded only by the
imagination of the programmer.

Computer Science in the 1960s to 80s spent a lot of effort making languages
which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the
reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful.
The reason for this is that the less powerful the language, the more you
can do with the data stored in that language. If you write it in a simple
declarative from, anyone can write a program to analyze it in many ways.
The Semantic Web is an attempt, largely, to map large quantities of
existing data onto a common language so that the data can be analyzed in
ways never dreamed of by its creators. If, for example, a web page with
weather data has RDF describing that data, a user can retrieve it as a
table, perhaps average it, plot it, deduce things from it in combination
with other information. At the other end of the scale is the weather
information portrayed by the cunning Java applet. While this might allow a
very cool user interface, it cannot be analyzed at all. The search engine
finding the page will have no idea of what the data is or what it is about.
This the only way to find out what a Java applet means is to set it running
in front of a person.

 I hope that is a good enough explanation of this principle. There are
millions of examples of the choice. I chose HTML not to be a programming
language because I wanted different programs to do different things with
it: present it differently, extract tables of contents, index it, and so on.


>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Adam Sobieski
>