There is a spoken language in Africa - I believe it is Malinke but
memory (and Google) may have failed me here - which has evolved a very
interesting alternative to designating people by name. A hyper-pronoun
system if you like.

Speakers of Malinke prefer not to name people directly in speech. To do
so would give the evil spirits a direct connection with the named
individual. Not good. Instead, speakers of Malinke embark on a
circumlocutory route to identifying the individual. For example if Mr. X
has just come in through the door, he might be identified in speech as
"the man who has just come through the door" rather than "Mr. X". Thus
throwing the evil spirits off the hunt.

Closer to home for me, the Irish language makes it well nigh impossible
to say "hello" without invoking God. In Irish, "God be with you"[1] is
the most common form of greeting. Without even thinking about it, Irish
speakers go around the place invoking the powers that be, to look kindly
on the people they meet and greet. A sort of built-in protection
mechanism against the forces of evil, right in the heart of the
language.

These are examples, of course, of culture impacting human language.
Nothing controversial there. More likely to be controversial is the
assertion I am about to make, that culture impacts computer languages
too. XML provides a good example of this phenomenon.

Mr. X comes through the door as in the Malinke example. How would we
capture the details of Mr. X in a computer program - say a Time and
Attendance system?

We might start - as so many HR and CRM systems do - with the idea that
people have names and addresses. But what is a name? What is it about a
name that distinguishes it from an address?

Perhaps a name is nothing more than a synonym for the innermost part of
an address. Let's use my address as an example and hope the evil spirits
do not read ITworld articles:

Sean McGrath
Propylon Ltd.
45 Blackbourne Square
Rathfarnham Gate
Dublin 14
Ireland
Europe
Earth

Let's turn this upside down:

Earth
Europe
Ireland
Dublin 14
Rathfarnham Gate
45 Blackbourne Square
Propylon Ltd.
Sean McGrath

The latter form of my address is a form that Malinke speakers would
perhaps prefer. It consists of a layer by layer zooming in on an
individual through ever tighter - ever more qualified - contexts. The
"name" is nothing more than the tightest qualifier. Malinke speakers
could stop short of that final, innermost part of the address and say
something like "The CTO" or "The tall bearded guy with the faraway look
in his eyes" etc. Thus uniquely identifying me.

There is an entire culture in IT that is Malinke-like in its approach to
identifying things. The proto-language for that culture is called SGML
and the most common dialects spoken today are HTML and XML.

Speakers of the XML dialect are the "doc-heads" who brought markup into
the new world of e-commerce and Web Services.

XML doc-heads are very fond of addressing - as opposed to unique names -
as a way of uniquely identifying things. Their cultural preference is a
direct result, I believe, of the impossibility of allocating unique
names for things in richly complex hierarchical structures.

Think of the complex structures you find in corpora of legislation,
exegesis of biblical texts, financial reports and so on. How do you
identify 'the third paragraph of the written judgement of Judge McGrath
in the case of X versus Y heard in the Queens Court on the 1st of
February 2001'? You do it Malinke-style. It has no unique name. It only
has an *address*.

Something very interesting happened to XML when it crossed over into the
world of e-commerce and Web Services. That land turned out to be heavily
populated with an aboriginal population of "data-heads". A culture with
a very different world view when it comes to naming things versus
addressing things.

In the relational database culture that many XML data-heads emanated
from, unique naming was of paramount importance. With a record
*everything* has a unique name. It simply must be so for the relational
model to work. Records themselves have unique identifiers. Again, it
simply must be so for the cultural ceremonies of normalization and joins
and so on to function.

As often happens when cultures collide, friction resulted in the XML
world over this issue. Some doc-heads, such as I, felt no need for any
new naming machinery other than already supplied in XML 1.0. In XML 1.0
an element of a document has a name - a tag. It is a name in the sense
that "Sean McGrath" is a name (i.e. it is merely the most qualified part
of my address). My full address can be determined by going to the top of
the document, and working your way down, layer by later until your
arrive at "Sean McGrath". This is the fully qualified address - a
completely unique name for me in an XML document.

However, the data-heads, felt the need for a direct naming convention
that could be used to make individual element names unique in an XML
document. This resulted in the creation of the XML namspaces
recommendation[2].

Now, we might look upon this as a quaint example of linguistic
evolution. Or we might view the clash of approaches and a sure fire way
to invoke the evil spirits of bad design.

I believe the latter is true. Unique names are so much less useful than
powerful addressing. Moreover, the pseudo-cascading effect of XML
namespaces creates a brittle middle-ground between content-free and
context-dependent naming that is best avoided in my opinion[3].

I have a simple rule about namespaces in XML applications. I don't use
them.

A simple rule that I commend to you for your consideration in your own
XML applications.

[1] http://www.fortunecity.com/bally/dublin/180/dia.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/
[3] http://www.itworld.com/nl/xml_prac/04112002/

http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com

» posted by ITworld staff

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