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After writing my last post I thought I might follow up with a bit of cognitive speculation. Since the first comment was exactly about the issue I was thinking about writing on, I might as well follow up quickly.

Jeff Snell replied:

You parse semantic markup in rich text all the time. When formatting changes, you apply a reason. RFC’s don’t capitalize MUST and SHOULD because the author is thinking in upper-case versus lower-case. They’re putting a strong emphasis on those words. As a reader, you take special notice of those words being formatted that way and immediately recognize that they contain a special importance. So I think that readers do parse writing into semantic markup inside their brains.

Emphasis not added. Wait, bold isn’t emphasis, it’s strong! So sorry, STRONG not added.

I think the reasoning here is flawed, in that it supposes that reflection on how we think is an accurate way of describing how we think.

A few years ago I got interested in cognition for a while and particularly some of the new theories on consciousness. One of the parts that really stuck with me was the difference in how we think about thinking, and how thinking really works (as revealed with timing experiments). That is, our conscious thought (the thinking-about-thinking) happened after the actual thought; we make up reasons for our actions when we’re challenged, but if we aren’t challenged to explain our actions there’s no consciousness at all (of course, you can challenge yourself to explain your reasoning — but you usually won’t). And then we revise history so that our reasoning precedes our decision, but that’s not always very accurate. This gets around the infinite-loop problem, where either there’s always another level of meta-consciousness reasoning about the lower level of consciousness, or there’s a potentially infinite sequence of whys that have to be answered for every decision. And of course sometimes we really do make rational decisions and there are several levels of why answered before we commit. But this is not the most common case, and there’s always a limit to how much reflection we can do. There are always decisions made without conscious consideration — if only to free ourselves to focus on the important decisions.

And so as both a reader and a writer, I think in terms of italic and bold. As a reader and a writer there is of course translation from one form to another. There’s some idea inside of me that I want to get out in my writing, there’s some idea outside of me that I want to understand as a reader. But just because I can describe some intermediate form of semantic meaning, it doesn’t mean that that meaning is actually there. Instead I invent things like “strong” and “emphasis” when I’m asked to decide why I chose a particular text style. But the real decision is intuitive — I map directly from my ideas to words on the page, or vice versa for reading.

Obviously this is not true for all markup. But my intuition as both a reader and a writer about bold and italic is strong enough that I feel confident there’s no intermediary representation. This is not unlike the fact I don’t consider the phonetics of most words (though admittedly I did when trying to spell “phonetics”); common words are opaque tokens that I read in their entirety without consideration of their component letters. And a good reader reads text words without consideration of their vocal equivalents (though as a writer I read my own writing out loud… is that typical? I’m guessing it is). A good reader can of course vocalize if asked, but that doesn’t mean the vocalization is an accurate representation of their original reading experience.

Though it’s kind of an aside, I think the use of MUST and SHOULD in RFCs fits with this theory. By using all caps they emphasize the word over the prose, they make the reader see the words as tokens unique from “must” and “should”, with special meanings that are related to but also much more strict than their usual English meaning. The caps are a way of disturbing our natural way of determining meaning because they need a more exact language.

I was talking a little with Daniel Krech (author of rdflib) about Semantic Web stuff and microformats and what they all mean. And he was saying that microformats were nice, because you could do something with them, but it would be nice to see that generalized.

By “generalized” I think he meant a general way of expressing arbitrary relationships. As an example, in hCard you can do:

<span class="tel">
  <span class="type">home</span>:
  <span class="value">773-555-3821</span>
</span>

The hCard specification (itself leaning heavily on vCard) defines tel, type, and there’s a general pattern of what value means. But if you want to describe some new kind of structure, there’s no way to do that really; there’s no marital status format, for instance (which would be useful for a singles search engine, as an example).

So I started thinking: can you really generalize it? And I started to think about Joe Gregorio’s attack of WADL:

Here is the very first example in the WADL specification.

That WADL file is a description of a search interface. But here is how you should really do it. That’s an OpenSearch document, that also describes a search interface.

Q: What’s the difference?

A: A mime-type.

Q: That doesn’t seem like much, does it make a difference?

A: Yes, it makes a big difference. When you get an OpenSearch document there is a whole data model and a set of interactions you know are possible because you read the OpenSearch specification. By reading that spec you know how to construct search queries. When I get a WADL document it might describe anything, from how to construct a search, to the APP, to JEP, to XML-RPC.

…

So when I say the difference is a ‘mime-type’, what I mean is that there is an entire spec somewhere which describes what that document means, and that meaning may include hypertext functionality, ala (X)HTML, XForms, and OpenSearch.

This made me think of shared understanding more than explicit descriptions. OpenSearch, APP, and Atom are very well described, but I think that’s only half of it: they are useful when they describe something that many people already understand.

Digressing slightly, one “semantic markup” ideal that still bugs me is <strong> and <em> vs. <b> and <i>. When I compose text I choose to make some words bold and some italic. I have no idea what “strong” and “emphasis” are even supposed to mean. When I’m composing text, I don’t actually know why I choose one or the other. If I sat down and thought about it I’m sure I could come up with a set of rules that describe when bold is appropriate and when italic is appropriate. But that is reflecting on my choice, it is not describing my choice. There is no intermediate semantic meaning between what I am saying and bold and italic. I think in bold and italic. Readers in turn find meaning in the text itself; they do not parse my writing into semantic markup in their brain.

I think there’s some connection between this and the shared understanding that microformats represents, and a more generalized RDF model does not represent. I know what hCard means; not just in an intellectual way, but I can imagine a dozen functional uses of it without hardly trying, and of course I am entirely clear on what contact information means. Moreover, I know what it means without actually figuring out what it means; if you asked me to articulate what contact information means I’d have to think a little, and I’m sure many people would come up with bad answers or be stumped. And yet they all actually understand what it means.

Bringing this back to Joe’s post, if I write something that produces or consumes Atom, Atompub, or OpenSearch, I understand the why of my code. With both WADL and RDF my code is divorced of the why. This isn’t about my personal understanding either; explaining it to me doesn’t serve any purpose, because with any exchange format it has to make sense to many many people to be useful. Even an education campaign won’t fix this: education by description is far inferior to education by doing, and there’s no “doing” to WADL and RDF right now.

That said, what is sufficiently obvious in the future may not be obvious now. Maybe we’ll all get smarter. Maybe someone will pioneer this stuff in a way that is really useful (Facebook?), and grow the public’s intuition about describing relationships in an abstract way. But until then I think microformats are going about this the right way, describing those things that are most easily describable.