Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot be parsed/processed by software

Hi B Tommie,

On Fri, 26 May 2023 08:00:43 -0400
B Tommie Usdin <[email protected]> wrote:

> > On May 26, 2023, at 5:51 AM, Marcus Reichardt <[email protected]> wrote:
> > ...  
> 
> > I have a hard time imagining "standard writers“ (if there’s such a species)
> > who haven’t heard of XML at this point.   
> 
> There is such a species. Actually, there are really 2 such species; with
> significantly different characteristics, and neither of which is guaranteed
> to have heard of XML. 
> 
>  - The vast majority of the world's standards are written as a volunteer
> effort by subject matter experts: engineers, mechanics, materials physicists, 
>    mechanics, biochemists, physicians, and other people with highly technical
>    expertise in areas totally unrelated to the encoding of computer readable
>    documents. 
> 
>    These people are often barely literate in the use of word processors and 
>    if they have heard of XML are more likely to think of machine-to-machine
>    information exchange than prose documents. 
>

I have a hypothesis that such wilfully-ignorant, non-geeky, non-hackery, people
are becoming less influential, less attractive, and rarer:

https://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/putting-cards-on-the-table-2019-2020/indiv-nodes/selling-for-stupider-ppl.xhtml



>  - The other group of "standard writers" are employees of standards
> development organizations. There are many such organizations world wide. Many
> of these people have heard of XML, have heard their counterparts talk about
> XML at conferences, think they probably should be paying attention to
> ANSI/NISO STS but are not, and have never actually seen an XML editor or and
> XML document except excerpted on a slide at a conference. 
> 
>    These people are following the several efforts in the standards community 
>    to develop "smart standards". "Smart standards" is what the standards 
>    community is calling standards that are deeply machine processable ... 
>    and with a few very special exceptions they don't exist yet.  
>    
>    These people, rightly in my opinion, are waiting to see their community 
>    agree on an approach to making the requirements in standards machine 
>    processable before committing time, money, and reputations to changing
>    their word-processor based processes. 
> 
>    BUT ... many of the people working in the publishing areas of standards 
>    development organizations are heads-down publishing people who support
>    the volunteer efforts, guide groups of volunteers through complex 
>    legal/regulatory processes, clean up word processing documents, proofread
>    PDF, and make publications happen using decades old processes. If these
>    people have heard of XML they dismissed it as new, trendy, probably
> expensive, and unimportant. 
> 


-- 

Shlomi Fish       https://www.shlomifish.org/
https://github.com/shlomif/validate-your-html - Validate Your HTML

Summer Glau can lead a horse to water, and then it will drink out of its
own volition.
    — https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/facts/Summer-Glau/

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