Three Myths of XML
by Kendall Grant Clark
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Pages: 1, 2, 3
2. Schemas are Magical
XML and schemas, in particular, are often the subject of magical thinking, which is precisely what causes the second myth about XML: "If we can just create the right XML vocabulary or schema, then a vast range of problems will be solved." (I discussed the politics of schemas and the Semantic Web in a two-part essay for XML.com earlier this year, which I invite interested readers to read.)
Magical thinking about XML is rife, and comes in two forms.
- The use of XML per se imparts any number of wonderful, often unsayable, benefits.
- The use of XML per se makes some things possible that otherwise cannot be done at all.
Magical thinking about XML occurs most often in the brains of programmers working with XML, and their technical managers and marketers -- that is, people who stand to gain most if XML is magical or, perhaps just as well, if it's thought to be by enough of the right kind of people. Hence, one may understand the otherwise strange phenomenon of technical experts able to believe three absurd things before lunch about XML's capabilities and virtues.
Kotok reported interest -- especially on the part of Patrice McDermott, head of OMB Watch -- in how the US federal government might use XML, which gives us a fine example of magical thinking:
McDermott ... envisioned a standard government-wide XML vocabulary that would link legislative activities with government databases. This XML vocabulary would enable the public to see the relationship between legislative actions on one hand, with the actual results of those actions as expressed in government records, an idea that generated more than a little nervous laughter among the meeting participants.
... McDermott said that a standard legislative vocabulary would enable the public to link these statistics to legislators' committee or floor votes, as well as election-campaign contribution databases. That kind of machine-readable information would give the public much more power and add accountability to the political process.
Let's set aside the almost unimaginable scope of the project McDermott implies when she suggests that one could use XML to link legislative activity to its subsequent results in federal government databases and information systems. Let's also set aside the fact that if such a project could be accomplished, it could be accomplished without the use of XML. (Recall the second form of magical thinking about XML claims that things hitherto impossible became practical with it.)
I want to focus attention on the idea that there could be, as Kotok reports McDermott to have suggested, "a standard government-wide XML vocabulary". That I should have to remind the head of OMB Watch that the US federal government may be the most staggeringly complex human institution in the history of staggeringly complex human institutions is, well, staggering. The federal government's scope is massive.
The very idea that there could be a single XML schema covering every institutional information requirement of the US federal government is a perfect example of the second form of magical thinking about XML, namely, that XML makes possible things otherwise impossible. It does not. It cannot. And it never will.
To understand why this is magical thinking, indulge the following thought experiment. Try to write in plain English prose -- or in any language of your choosing -- a nontrivial, interesting vocabulary for describing the information encoding requirements of the US federal government. Or, to make things easier, how about doing that for just the executive branch? Or, again easier, just the Justice Department. Take care that your head doesn't explode in the process.
Of course even if such a schema existed, it's hard to see how it could help make government more accountable or transparent -- two improvements people ordinarily see as immensely difficult. I stress ordinarily because, except in the thrall of magical thinking, it's plain that McDermott's project faces numerous insuperable obstacles, most of which are strictly social in nature, some of which are technical in the sense that we just don't understand large-scale social systems, their relations, their causal connections, in any appreciably sufficient way. There is something indictably wrong with the marketing and evangelism of XML if or when it induces in otherwise rational people the kind of magical thinking on display here.
In fact McDermott's only rival as the canonical instance of the myth that XML is magically powerful is the HumanML effort. (And McDermott's suggestion isn't actually a rival since it's a suggestion and not a full-blown project, as is the case with HumanML.) I cannot bring myself to call HumanML an actual development effort, given its absurd set of goals. As its founders and participants claim, HumanML
...has a goal of "enriching human communications and reducing human misunderstanding" through explicit mechanisms to represent paralinguistic features of human communication.
The HumanML specification will be built on top of current endeavors. Our focus will be to embed root human characteristics in our messages, and help bring humanity towards universal empathy. It will be a very interesting world in the future, where we finally begin to work together, with both universal knowledge, and universal empathy.
These are no longer flowery far-off aspirations. These are finally concrete attainable endeavors, now possible through XML (emphasis added)
Which desperately bespeaks the ancient human dream, as old as the first stirrings of civilization, of the perfect language, now rebirthed of technophilic parents. I'd suggest a careful reading of Umberto Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language if I thought it would help.
But, in short, one wonders what the HumanML folks think XML does that SGML (or any number of other, more powerful representational schemes) cannot do such that XML now, "finally", makes "universal knowledge and universal empathy ... concrete attainable endeavors"?
Magical indeed.
