Three Myths of XML
A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web
...[A]pplying XML to the process of crafting legislation [has] ... the potential at least of transforming the basic relationship between citizens and their elected representatives. -- Alan Kotok, "Can XML Help Write the Law?" XML.com, May 9, 2001 (emphasis added).
Thinking clearly about the social implications of computer technology always repays the investment it requires, especially when the computer technology in question is the Internet and the Web, both of which have been called revolutionary by their boosters. And it always pays to be skeptical of words like "revolution" and "revolutionary" -- words that can be said far more easily than they can be meant.
Technology is always already embedded in particular social and historical contexts, most often ones in which radical social change is unlikely. After all, technology doesn't fall, as if a gift of the gods, from the sky. The possibilities of social change brought about by technology are limited as much by the social and historical contexts within which technology comes into existence as they are by intrinsic features of the technology itself.
This general point is perhaps never so true as when it's applied to two specific areas of computer technology, both of which concern XML.com readers directly: the Semantic Web and, of course, XML. In what follows I debunk three myths of XML, each of which in some way bears on the question of the role of technology in social change:
- The first myth rests on a confusion about the meanings of words like "free" and "open" when they are applied to XML-encoded information.
- The second myth is that XML is magical, that it has some unique properties that makes impossible things possible.
- The third is that technology, including XML, is more determinative of social relations and institutions than they are of it.
1. XML Information is Open and Free
The first myth is that information encoded in XML is necessarily open and free. Many people who have been exposed to XML are prone to forgetting and, hence, obscuring the most basic fact -- XML is a tool for making data formats. I'm tempted to say it's just a data format, it's merely a data format. As the wider world goes, computer data formats aren't all that interesting or significant, nor are the tools for making them. Of course, XML is enmeshed in a range of assumptions, social practices, economic arrangements, and so on. But it's still just a tool for making data formats.
What words like "open" and "free" can mean when applied to a computer data format and what they can mean when applied to a social practice or political institution have very little in common. This first myth isn't true for any public, ordinary meaning of "open" and "free". But it arises precisely from the mistaken belief that the really interesting, political meanings of ``open'' and ``free'' apply to XML and to its uses.
When XML advocates, like those at the W3C, say that XML is "open" they mean, approximately, that it isn't a proprietary tool. In that sense XML (the specification plus its associated, standardized technologies) is open. But the openness of XML isn't, one might say, viral; it necessarily transfers neither to the data formats or information systems XML makes possible nor to the information that it encodes, each of which can be as proprietary and, hence, closed as anything can be.
XML's openness, in the first sense, means you can process XML created by Corporation A's tools with Corporation B, C, or D's tools. Or you can process your XML-encoded information with the tools written by an independent, free software developer who's written some nifty Perl XML libraries.
In this limited, technical sense -- the sense in which XML is just one computer tool among many, and one nearly identical (in relevant parts) to SGML -- XML is "open" and "free," and rather a decent evolutionary step toward interoperable information systems (which are the only sort worth having).
Calling public institutions, social practices, and economic arrangements "open" and "free" is akin to calling them democratic, egalitarian, and just. Whether or not any chunk of the world is democratic, egalitarian, and just can never simply be a matter of whether XML is used there. Adding XML to an undemocratic, inegalitarian, or unjust chunk of the world will never make the crucial difference.
To assume that because the government or some corporation uses XML makes that government or corporation democratic or egalitarian or just is to assume mistakenly either that, first, "open" and "free" can mean the same thing when applied to social, political, and economic chunks of the world as they mean when applied to computer tools; or, second, that the chief impediment to some government or corporation becoming (or becoming more) democratic, egalitarian, or just is that some of its data is encoded in a proprietary way. The first assumption is a conceptual error; the second is or rests on a factual one.
All of which is to say far too little about the fact that the US federal government uses SGML extensively, has used it for at least 20 years, and no one believes that such use has made a political difference.
1a. XML Information Systems are Democratic
A variation of the first myth maintains that information systems that use XML are thereby more fitting in a democratic society, or that they are thereby themselves democratic. In the best of cases, this myth arises from the conceptual or factual errors above. In the worst, it arises from intentional obfuscation.
1b. XML means Universal Access
Another variation is that XML's "openness" means that the information encoded by it is universally accessible in a socially helpful way. One may fall for this myth only by being ignorant of XML and computer technology generally; or by forgetting that in the US the most serious impediments to universal access to information are, first, the quickening of privatization of the US's information infrastructure and, second, the digital divide.
Several variants of this myth appear in Alan Kotok's recent XML.com piece, "Can XML Help Write the Law?", a report of a meeting which considered the use of XML in the information systems of the US Congress and the various information management agencies associated with Congress and the executive branch.
Kotok reports that, according to the head of the LegalXML effort,
...[b]efore the Web the average citizen had little or no access to laws and legislation, now much of that information is available for free or low cost. Lawyers may still use the Lexis and WestLaw databases for legal research, but legal resource sites and forums provide citizens with more legal information than ever. Publishers like National Journal and Congressional Quarterly also provide low-cost clipping and bill-tracking services with information that used to be the monopoly of lobbyists.
Been a victim of "magical thinking" about XML? Or do you think that XML really can change the world for better? Comment in our forum. |
| Post your comments |
For many, perhaps most, citizens, access to laws and legislation continues to be, even in the age of the Web, exactly what it's been since the early 20th century: a matter of a visit to the local library. XML can do nothing to change that since many, if not most, people still have as their most reliable point of access to the Web the same local public library. Putting legal information in XML cannot do a single thing to remedy the problems of digital access in the US (and around the world).
Paralleling the problem of individual access to digital information is the contraction of collective access or privatization. There's simply nothing that any computer data format can do to prevent or ameliorate it. What's worse, many government XML initiatives will be avenues for the further privatization of public information systems, which many observers find threatening to the health of American democracy.
