A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

[Alan Kennedy]

Alan Kennedy:

>> Solely because of technical inertia, and unwillingness to address
>> the (perhaps excessive) complexity of our various communications
>> layers, i.e. our own "Tower of 7-bit Babel", we're suppressing
>> cultural diversity, for no technically valid reason.

Ben Finney wrote:

> Yes.  The solutions must involve a significant sociological element,
> since that is a large part of the current situation.

The only point I would like to add is that I think all of our
sociological situations are going change rather rapidly over the next
few years. The business landscape has changed pretty radically over
the last few years, I think it's going to change even more once global
initiatives such EB-XML, etc, kick in.

>> I personally don't have the slightest problem with reformulating
>> NNTP and POP to use XML instead: In a way, I think it's almost
>> inevitable, given how poor our existing "ascii" technologies are
>> at dealing with i18n and l10n issues. Emails and usenet posts are
>> all just documents after all.
>
> I've no idea, though, why you keep banging on about XML for simple,
> plain-text documents.  Substitute XML with UTF-8 in the above, and I
> agree entirely.  This is a problem of character encodings, yet you
keep
> wanting to apply a heavy, structural markup solution.  That way lies
> HTML/XML email, and it's totally unnecessary and unhelpful.

You quite probably put all of your email through a virus scanner? If
it's full nasty xml, why not put it through an XML transform instead,
that removes the images/webbugs for example, or "downcasts" it to
ASCII? It's just a stage in the processing chain. Write your own
transform
if you wish, it will interoperate seamlessly with your gateway
processing
software, regardless of implementation language. It's only XML.

BTW, Bengt, <subject>I</subject><verb
person="firstsingular">hate</verb>
<object type="anonymous">this</object><conjunctive>too</conjunctive>.

Ugh!

> Email and NNTP are lightweight, freeform, unstructured document
> formats, and they're good that way. 

POP and NNTP were great for what they were designed for: sending ascii
messages in the age of uucp, uuencode, 2.4K modems, acoustic couplers
and phone-phreakers. These days, there's so much protocol wrapping and
unwrapping going on that mistakes happen all the time. Witness the
wrong URIs episode today in "Python-URL".

These days, you and I could probably have a reasonable
telephone^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H voice conversation over the net. You're in
Australia (g'day) and I'm in Ireland. Should be only 0.3 to 0.5 second
delay. I have a 256Kbit/1024Kbit connection. You? We have much more
reliable connections now, and perhaps we need to focus a little more
on what information we're sending, rather than how we're sending it.

> Nothing you've said so far has offered even
> a pretence of a reason for abandoning freeform text formats for
> heavy, markup-oriented formats.

In my simplistic view, I see an increasing requirement in the modern
day for people requiring to communicate meaningfully with each other:
to work together on complicated projects, across barriers of time
zones. Working together requires good communications. But really
achieving anything requires structuring ideas and information, and
structuring ideas means (to me) either using the same software or
forming a common framework within which to operate.

In the wonderfully diverse world of open source, interoperability
among diversity is a highly desired quality, i.e. everybody uses their
own preferred combination of software. I see XML as offering a simple
way to form those same common frameworks, which will allow
NON-technical people to work together on structuring and coordinating
their efforts, and to also enjoy the benefits of interoperability
among diversity. It will allow the less IT-literate PhDs in
microbiology, medical science, genomics, renewable energy,
anthropology, etc, etc, etc, to better coordinate their efforts. I
expect an explosion of data interchange among non-IT scientists, now
that all the serious office packages, i.e. Microsoft and Open*Office,
are using XML as their formats. All the world's data, suddenly
free(-ish) to move between software and and between people and their
preferences.

The kind of protocols we need in the modern day are protocols like
UDDI: Universal Description and Discovery of Web Services.

http://www.uddi.org/

And I expect that 99% of the time, people who use UDDI services will
never see an angle-bracket, publishing or subscribing. But if they
want to become publishers on minimal resources, they'll be able to
simply put their IT together, using wonderful language tools such as
python processing XML.

No barrier, technical or financial, to entry.

> Where character encoding is the problem, Unicode is the current best
> solution.  But that in no way necessitates a markup format.

Let's tear down all the old copper wires, and replace them with
microwave towers. They were an eyesore anyway ;-)

regards,

--
alan kennedy
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