love is all around

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

Some time later (the 90s), God (or some European scientists, working on God’s behalf) created the Web, and lo, it was good. The little websites went forth and multiplied until there were billions and billions of them. This was great because now human knowledge that was once concealed in pieces of dead trees, limited in readership by physical proximity (you had to be within a foot or so from the piece of dead tree to read it), was now stored in such a way that anyone anywhere, given they could find an onramp, could ride a superhighway to information freedom and unlimited knowledge.

The growth of the Web had a side-effect that was almost as significant as the unlimited anywhere-to-anywhere data publishing for humans aspect (call it HumanWeb) - the Web unwittingly became the platform on which the entire next generation of all networked computing would operate, via technologies like Web Services and XML (let’s call that MachineWeb).

The MachineWeb phenomenon revealed a flaw in the design of HumanWeb - there are 14 billion websites, but like the scattered builders of the tower of Babel, these sites are all speaking different languages. Well, that’s not entirely true - they all speak HTML, but HTML was not meant to do much beyond describing how a page of information should be displayed to a human (ideally 32 pixels large, without serifs, pink and blinking), or declaring that some kind of link between two documents exists (“Click here to see pictures of my pet mongoose”). So yes, this system was designed to be able to publish all human knowledge, but only in a very, very unorganized way, which makes higher-order functions like categorization, aggregation, and notification very very difficult. For instance, we need Google, the most powerful supercomputer brain on the planet, constantly sorting through the muck, just to help us find things, which it sometimes might do for you, if you’re lucky. But being able to find things, though important, is really only part of what a useful knowledge system should be able to do. Information is much more valuable when it is stored in such a way that higher-order operations on it are possible, and better yet, are easy.

The desire for higher-order data lead to some integration of MachineWeb into HumanWeb, in a technology called RSS, whose history as a much contested, rewritten, and backronym‘d standard is tragicomic and illustrates how badly some kind of solution, anything was needed, no matter how confusing and fragmented the effort (really - when have you ever seen such wide adoption of such a disorganized set of standards as RSS 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.3 and 1.0?). Despite the stumbling emergence of RSS, it revolutionized HumanWeb, by making aggregation and notification possible, (and even somewhat practical, but not easy).

For all its promise though, MachineWeb is fundamentally not suitable for organizing HumanWeb. MachineWeb’s technologies are too generalized and complex for most people to understand and use, and too reliant on centralized standardization and deployment schemes to actually implement it on a broad scale. HumanWeb is just too vast, non-specialist and ad-hoc. It would be like trying to drink the sea.

Enter microformats. Microformats offer everyone a little sip of sea water.

“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”

The microformat design principles speak for themselves (I find these principles useful as guidelines for software development in general):

• solve a specific problem
• start as simple as possible
  • solve simpler problems first
  • make evolutionary improvements
• design for humans first, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services
• modularity / embeddability

With microformats, the 14 billion pages of HumanWeb can be augmented with high-order possibilities in a decentralized, ad-hoc fashion. Anyone who has already published some information online can make that information more valuable by adding microformats to their pages, using mostly the same skills and tools that went into creating those pages in the first place. Organizations who are in the business of helping people find things on HumanWeb will benefit from looking for microformats while they are aggregating, categorizing or otherwise operating on HumanWeb pages.

And God saw the microformats, and knew that they would bring some form to the Earth (at least the online part), and make the deep a little less dark and scary.

THE END

Or is it…?

Updated 2007-04-30: Correction: The Web was invented by European scientists in the 90s, not by the US military in the 80s.