Are there any Scholars dedicated to the Study of the World Wide Web, at this stage of the game

I just read some article on a struggling website attempting to promote itself as an actual publication with a degree of journalistic significance, written by two supposed freelancers who market themselves as web designers. In the particular article that I had read, they endeavored to arrive at an appropriate and useful definition of the social phenomenon known as Web 2.0. The article argued that a salient characteristic of Web 2.0 was its abandonment of XHTML and HTML in favor of technologies engendered by the development of XML from its forerunner SGML. They went on to emphasize the integrative functions provided for by the deployment of XML when aggregating streams of information. This, of course, is a conclusion with which few would take exception.

However, what I did find strange about these two professed Web design professionals is their abject failure to understand that the markup language, XHTML, is a type of XML. Although still more limited than most varieties of XML, which have already proliferated into a multitude of dialects servicing numerous integrative schemata, XHTML remains an extension of XML, and for a professional to lack such rudimentary knowledge of website programming captured my interests.

Now, with that said, we should not neglect to tease out what is marginally valuable from the essay written by the two freelance web design architects. Despite their misleading characterized of XHTML, they did raise valid points concerning the direction in which web design is heading that warrant further elaboration.

The issue of interoperability plagues software designers as they struggle to multi-stream their innovations into as many platforms as possible. These, often ad hoc, measures - designed to facilitate interoperability of an application and its data byproducts across various platforms - are difficult and exhaust resources, when one must constantly retailer portions of his or her programming creation in order to fit into the changing environment of operating systems as well as additional medium - spawned from new technologies - upon which he or she wants her application be compatible.

The frustrations that accrue from the frenetic pace of technological change in Informational Capitalism, demands a constant vigilance and superb abilities at refitting applications to possess roughly the same functionality; only, this time, on a different platform where the original application must also interact with other processes that are indigenous to the environment associated with the alternative computing machine.

Here is the crux of this short essay, as I see it; and, I hope, as well as the authors of the article, both of whom elude my memory to the point that they cannot be properly referenced; they can only be designated through indirect - not necessarily identifiable - referring expressions. The development over the last ten years or so of XML - a simplification IBM’s SGML markup language - has become a robust tool that compensates for many of the aforementioned difficulties related to interoperability. XML is essentially a language that lacks any structure that can be, subsequently formulated for particular purposes, used to impose a newly conceived format upon the data streams it is being used to integrate. There are, of course, syntactical rules that apply to all forms of XML, but they are starting to be relaxed, and can be further relaxed through subversions of the standards that emerge from the W3C consortiums; impartial and felicitously disposed intellects who are motivated to contribute to the common good, as I often indulgently believe allowing my best impressions of humanity to prevail

Now, finally, we can understand the significations of XML in the praxes of programmers and site designers. XML is the catalyst upon which interoperability can be managed and, indeed, streamlined, from the imposition of grammatical specifications declared in the <name spaces> provided by XML; thus in essence, serving as a meta language upon which schemata of programming and functionality can be integrated into an aggregate through the deployment of an XML dialect, which it not necessarily a translation as much as it is an appropriation intended to integrate the formally disparate streams of information into a new language that preserves the significations of its constituents, but they are available in two senses: One in their original semantic entailments; the other in their newly established meanings in the new contexts in which they are immersed.

Russell Cole

russellcole@populistamerica.com

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