Two Myths of XML

A slightly revised draft based on Bij's helpful
feedback.

If someone could give it a once-over for typos and the like,
I'd appreciate the help.

Kendall



Two Myths of XML
By Kendall Clark


     A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will
     unleash a revolution of new possibilities -- Teaser of Tim
     Berners-Lee's Scientific America article, ``The Semantic Web,''
     May 2001
     
     ...[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, ``[1]Can XML Help Write the Law?" May 9, 2001, XML.com
     
   One of my ongoing projects is to think and write clearly about the
   social implications of computer technology, especially the Internet,
   the Web, and free software. Each of these has been called
   revolutionary by proponents. It always pays to be skeptical of
   ``revolution'' and ``revolutionary'', words that can be said far
   more easily than they can be meant.
   
   While computer technology might be used to aid radical social
   change, I have argued that it is always already embedded in very
   particular social and historical contexts, most often ones in which
   radical social change for the good is unlikely; after all,
   technology doesn't fall, as if a gift of the gods, from the sky.
   Except in extraordinary circumstances, computer technology is
   developed and deployed by corporations, i.e., institutions
   fundamentally opposed to radical social change and, so,
   fundamentally committed to maintaining the status quo.
   
   (The funding of computer technology is often provided by the public,
   especially in the case of the Internet, the Web, and much free
   software. The costs and risks of development are borne by the
   public; the profits, payoffs, and control of the technology are
   reaped by corporations and investors -- neat trick, huh? -- as part
   of the ongoing corporate assault on (the very idea of) public
   space.)
   
   I have recently focused on two specific areas of computer
   technology: the [2]Semantic Web and, one of its constitutive
   technologies, [3]XML. In what follows I debunk some myths about XML
   and the Semantic Web by subjecting them to critical inquiry. I
   examine two such myths, give examples of each, and explain the truth
   behind the facade.
   
   1. XML Information is Open and Free
   
   The first XML 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. In fact, 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. Of course,
   it's enmeshed in a range of assumptions, social practices, economic
   arrangements, and so on. But it's still just a (tool for making)
   data format(s). (In what remains, I will use ``data format'' as a
   shorthand for ``tool for making data formats'' for the sake of
   economy.)
   
   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. The intersection of these two ranges of meaning is,
   practically speaking, nil. But the first myth, that information
   encoded in XML is necessarily ``open'' and ``free'', arises
   precisely from the mistaken belief that the intersection is
   substantial and interesting.
   
   When XML advocates, like those at the [4]W3C, say that XML is
   ``open'' they mean, approximately, that it isn't a proprietary tool
   for making data formats. In that sense XML (the specification plus
   its attendant, standardized technologies) is open in the sense of
   non-proprietary. But the openness of XML isn't, one might say,
   viral; that is, it doesn't necessarily transfer to the data formats
   XML makes possible and information that it encodes, both of which
   can be as proprietary and, hence, closed as anything can be.
   
   XML's openness, in the first sense, means you can access XML created
   by Corporation A's tools with Corporation B, C, or D's tools. (In
   computer talk, entities that produce software tools are called
   ``vendors'', a term that almost always means, simply, corporation.)
   Or you can access your XML-encoded information with the tools
   written by, say, Lucy F. Hacker, 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 data format 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).
   
   But 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 be simply a
   matter of whether XML is used as a computer data format there. That
   is, adding the XML computer data format to an undemocratic,
   inegalitarian, or unjust chunk of the world will rarely, if ever,
   make the crucial difference.
   
   Thus to assume that because the government or some corporation uses
   XML -- an open, free data format -- to encode some of its data that
   government or corporation is (or is more) democratic, egalitarian,
   or just is to assume, mistakenly, that 1) ``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 data
   formats; or 2) 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 data
   format. (To say nothing of the fact, inconvenient as it may be to
   some XML boosters, that the federal government uses SGML extensively
   and has for a good 20 years.) The first assumption is a conceptual
   error; the second is or rests on a factual one.
   
   1a. XML Information Systems are Democratic
   
   A variant on 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 variant is that XML's ``openness'' means that the
   information encoded by it is universally accessible in a socially
   helpful way. The only ways to be taken in by this myth are 1) to be
   ignorant of XML and computer technology generally, and 2) to forget
   that in the US, at least, the most serious impediments to universal
   access to information are a) the endless death march of
   privatization of the US's information infrastructure (which is a
   vital part of the corporate assault on (the very idea of) public
   space) and b) the digital divide.
   
   Examples
   
   Several of the variants of the first myth about XML come together 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.
   
   According to the head of the [5]LegalXML effort,
   
     ...Before 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.
     
   Thus we have fine examples of some myths about XML. For many,
   perhaps most, citizens, access to laws and legislation continues to
   be, even in the age of the Web, exactly what it's always been: 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).
   
   What's most troubling about that quote, however, is the way
   privatization of the national information infrastructure is simply
   assumed as unobjectionable and unavoidable. (If you're interested
   in the history of information infrastructure privatization, which
   didn't gain real momentum until the 1960s or so, pick up Herbert
   Schiller's Information and the Crisis Economy or his Public Inc.) To
   be truly empowered, citizens don' need ``low-cost'' -- and the
   services of National Journal, Congressional Quarterly, and regular
   access to SGML versions of the Federal Register are anything but
   inexpensive -- access to congressional and executive branch
   information. They need and deserve ``free'' information, which is to
   say, information they don't have to pay for twice.
   
   One of the chief impediments to citizen empowerment vis-a-vis the
   information economy is privatization (including the total giveaway
   of the publicly-funded Internet infrastructure in the mid-90s), and
   there's simply nothing that any data format can do to prevent or
   ameliorate it. What's worse, given the present political climate,
   most government XML initiatives will just be avenues for the further
   privatization of public information systems; privatization which is
   absolutely not politically neutral and which is ruinous for the
   health of American democracy.
   
   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 have discussed the
   politics of XML schemas and the Semantic Web at length in an
   [6]essay for XML.com. I invite interested readers to take a look at
   it.)
   
   Magical thinking about XML is rife, and comes in two flavors (first
   formulated in this way by my colleague Bijan Parsia, to whom I'm
   grateful):
   
   First. The use of XML per se imparts any number of wonderful, often
   unsayable, benefits.
   
   Second. 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, the otherwise inexplicable
   phenomenon of technical experts able to believe three absurd things
   before lunch about XML's capabilities and virtues.
   
   Examples
   
   Alan Kotok's reporting of Patrice McDermott's (who's head of [7]OMB
   Watch) interest in how the federal government might use XML gives a
   fine example of magical thinking about XML:
   
     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 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
   and breadth and coverage 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 or, properly speaking, it cannot and never will.
   
   (To understand why this is magical thinking, 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
   about XML, 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 for being made the canonical instance
   of the myth that XML is somehow magically powerful is the HumanML
   effort. (And McDermott's suggestion isn't really a rival since it's
   only a suggestion and not a full-blown project, as is the case with
   HumanML.) I cannot bring myself to call it an actual development
   effort, given its absurd set of goals. As its founders 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.
   
   3. XML is the Dog, Not the Tail
   
     [M]achine-readable information would give the public much more
     power and add accountability to the political process. -- Alan
     Kotok, ``Can XML Help Write the Law?''
     
   The final point I want to make is less about myth and more about
   fallacy that lies behind various XML distortions. Computer
   technology, including XML, reflects institutional and social
   structures far more often than it changes them. Technology is only
   possible within the context of social and political practices that
   create, maintain, and extend it. And the social and political
   practices that constitute social institutions are the limits within
   which technology can mean or be anything at all.
   
   Now the relationship is more reciprocal and dynamic than that,
   actually. Technology can give rise to new social practices; but only
   to those that the larger social framework can or will accommodate.
   Technology alone cannot make a revolution, though it could spark or
   aid or abet one.
   
   The other facet of taking technology to be independent of the social
   context within which it always already operates is to misjudge its
   alliance and uses. In other words, the bad guys always have the
   newest, bestest, fastest, powerfulest stuff, and they always have
   more of it. And, generally, any tool can be used to impede social
   change as well as to foster it. Hence, even if XML had some property
   especially conducive of citizen empowerment, the forces that oppose
   such empowerment are free to use it too. Technology often amounts to
   a draw in social struggles. Like every other human tool, XML isn't
   immune to abuse or ``dual use''.
   
   Most enthusiastic proponents of (the beneficial social implications)
   XML have the cart before the horse or, to mix metaphors, they have
   the tail, XML, wagging the dog, society and social possibility.
   Whether or not ``machine-readable information'' can ever do anything
   to empower citizens, or to reform a wayward or corrupt political
   process, will always be less a matter of the technology in question
   and more a matter of the kind of hard, real-world political and
   social organizing that has always been the real engine of social
   change.
   
   Note: The next article in this two-part series will examine the
   tension between the Semantic Web's promise of perfect information
   filtering and the needs of democracy, by way of a review of Cass
   Sunstein's new book Republic.com.

References

   1. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/09/legalxml.html
   2. http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html
   3. http://www.xml.com/
   4. http://www.w3c.org/
   5. http://www.legalxml.org/
   6. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/31/politics.html
   7. http://www.ombwatch.org/


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Posted on Monkeyfist at http://monkeyfist.com/articles/755