Fwd: Words

>On another group I encountered a rather compelling statement about a 
>subject we discuss a lot but don't do too much about: 
>readability/usability of our documents. With some editing here's what 
>Brian said:
>
>I don't know what Australian idiots are like but ours (and I include 
>myself here) cannot handle sentences like "RDF is based on a concrete 
>formal model utilising directed graphs that elude to the semantics of 
>resource description". I know precisely what each word means but the 
>sentence? Forget it.
>
>Is there no recognition amongst the W3C that we (employers) have to be 
>able to find people who can use these developments; ie write code and such 
>like. It is a complete waste of time academics constructing systems which 
>only a small percentage of the brighter population can deal with and no 
>surprise to me that it is now nearly six years since the meeting in 
>Dublin, Ohio came up with the Dublin Core which you are still trying to 
>get off the ground.
>
>I am not stupid, I have worked in IT as a programmer, systems analyst, 
>consultant etc since 1968 but I've just spent four days trying to get to 
>grips with this technology and I am baffled. Do you honestly believe that 
>anybody could write more than, say, three of four lines of XML without 
>making an error? Do you believe that a normally intelligent person could 
>then easily find and correct the error? Do you believe that a normal, sane 
>person could have the first idea of what you are talking about from 
>reading the material from the W3C?
>
>Yours and your colleague's work is totally fixated with the almost 
>religious purity of computing science and, as a result, I think you
>are taking us back to the days of ASSEMBLER when programming was for the 
>elite few because it was so damned difficult to do.
>
>I can give you lots more samples like the sentence I quoted earlier.  "The 
>Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is a cross-disciplinary
>international effort to develop mechanisms for the discovery-oriented 
>description of diverse resources in an electronic environment".
>
>"The metadata ecology of the Internet will be partitioned into many 
>modular niches, each targeted to particular functions or communities" 
>Never mind the awful English, what does it MEAN?
>
>One more for luck, and this is a beauty so I've quoted it in full.  "The 
>great power of both XML and RDF is the ability for individual
>content providing communities to declare their own modes of expression for 
>the description of resources of importance to them. However, rather than 
>having each community develop a comprehensive system describing all 
>aspects of their resources, XML and RDF offer a more interoperable 
>foundation whereby a single description may comprise elements drawn from 
>any number of accessible recording practices".
>
>It's almost as though the author was writing for a Social Sciences tract. 
>We chaps in the real world need working, practical documents we can 
>reliably and quickly understand.
>
>Surely you can see that you are taking us down a path we cannot afford to 
>travel? Programming, systems development, call it what you will, and 
>whether it is for applications or text systems, must be open to the mass 
>of people or we'll all go broke trying to pay the wages of the few people 
>capable of producing something.
>
>Come on, give us a break. Tell us a) what you mean, b) how we can use it 
>and c) how we can set standards for project quality and management. We 
>need simple, memorable syntax and constructions which can be taught to, 
>and written by people of average intelligence and which can be easily and 
>reliably checked, corrected and quality controlled.
>
> From the heart.
>
>Brian E Smith
>Managing Director
>SOPHCO SYSTEMS LIMITED

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Friday, 13 October 2000 16:59:43 UTC