La Grange voit rouge
By glazou on Sunday 21 December 2003, 21:28 - General - Permalink
A few days ago, a small of group of people released a proposal called XFN. Describe it however you want, here is my word on it : XFN is a super-simple solution for a super-simple problem that does not deserve two years of international standardization; "I want to establish some kind of relationship between my blog and this one listed in my blogroll". It is NOT meant to solve ALL kinds of relationships, it is NOT meant to be the mother-of-all-relationship-languages, it's not that and we KNOW it. If you really try to see it as it is, it is a good proposal and we don't need more. If you don't, well, just try to think that a small group of people made public something they like. You like it, you use it; you don't like it, you don't use it. Insults are not needed.
Last time I saw rants like Karl's against a proposal, that was against the Netscapisms back in 1995. And I was myself ranting (the only proposal I really liked at that time was the Frames proposal). Well. The font tag was not superb; JavaScript is not a declarative way of adding behaviors to a page. But the Web IS what it is today thanks to those Netscapisms. Et merde aux académies. I was young and I was mistaken. Netscape was right, damn right.
On a more global note, I do believe that computer languages and markup languages share an important characteristic with spoken languages : whatever says the Academy responsible for the present and future of a given language and its "purity", that language is the fact of its speakers. What the speakers want the language to be and become, it is and becomes. Our Web Academies should keep that in mind more often than they currently do.
And so it goes with HTML. And XHTML.
Avec FOAF, vous n'avez qu'un seul fichier à gérer, vous pouvez étendre les concepts en utilsant des vocabulaires complets hérités d'autres environnement, c'est souple et simple.
Yeah. Could be. But to understand that sentence, even if you're a native french speaker, you don't need to a "bad geek", Karl... You need to be Karl. And that is why XFN is better than FOAF.
Comments
Now I think the current XFN implementation lacks a friendship keyword for "foe"
> whatever says the Academy responsible for the present and future of
> a given language and its "purity", that language is the fact of its
> speakers. What the speakers want the language to be and become, it is
> and becomes. Our Web Academies should keep that in mind more often
> than they currently do.
There is a big difference between a spoken language, limited to "some people", and a proposal to make something universal.
XFN has not been designed to be universal. Period.
In response to glandium:
Actually, XFN < gmpg.org/xfn > was very much designed to be inclusive and universally accessible to all from the beginning, as much or even more so than blogs and blogrolls. If you see a specific lack of universality, we'd like to hear about it.