Well with a new version of Windows out, it’s time for Mac zealots to begincontinue the bashing. One of the earliest posts I have on this incarnation of my blog was griping about Mac fanboys and their relentless need to criticise Windows. At the time I didn’t use a Mac, and now I do. My opinion about Mac and Windows zealotry remains the same. I like Macs and I like PCs, but I don’t see the need for this constant sniping at each other.

John August tweeted a couple days ago regarding the Windows 7 release:

Windows 7 is here! My favorite feature? An excuse to dredge up articles praising Vista when it launched.

Sigh. I think tech reviews are, in general, not good predictors of success, for a variety of reasons. But, more importantly than that, praise in the tech world is a moving target. Vista probably was the best Windows released to that point. Windows 7 probably is the best Windows released to this point. It’s not as if when the new Mac OS comes out, the reviews all trash it as the worst Mac operating system yet. Technology improves, whether through leaps, hobbles, or bounds, why would anyone think otherwise?

A List Apart published an article yesterday about the “unwebbability” of many written documents, and calls for XML to save the day.

I actually discussed that idea, albeit tangentially, in my last post about HTML5 vs XHTML2. The one thing few people emphasize anymore is that The Internet is not the same as The Web. The lingua franca of the web is HTML¹ but XML is probably better for the internet at large.

The article tries to argue that HTML isn’t capable of semantically representing many formats, though the one they deconstruct in particular is the typical screenplay format².

Most of the arguments against representing screenplays don’t hold much water to me; specifically, the idea that using class names to indicate semantic meaning is insufficient seems odd. Provided there’s an accepted microformat that people follow, class names are equivalent to xml elements in terms of semantic meaning. They are both simply tokens that indicate meaning to those accepting of those particular tokens.

But, accepting their assertion that class names are unacceptable as a retainer of semantic tokens, they fail to understand that XML does not have more inherent semantics than HTML, it only has greater extensibility of semantics.

This is a point that bears repeating, in slightly different words. An XML document has no semantic meaning without a predefined and shared document structure.

We could create an XML derivative Screenplay Markup Language (SML) but it would be utterly useless on The Web. It would be great on The Internet as an open format that could be freely exchanged, and perhaps even transformed into HTML that would mimic the visuals of the real thing, but SML would be useless on The Web.

The Internet is not for the presentation of documents, so XML is ideal. But if you want to display something on The Web, HTML is the way to go. It’s really not that complicated.

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Footnotes

1. A phrase which is mocked in the article, but is nonetheless true. [↩]
2. Actually, they pick on John August’s Scrippets tool that allows screenplays to be easily written and displayed on blogs, which is a little harsh because it’s a great tool for people who write about screenwriting. [↩]

John August wrote about the changes occurring in society and culture and personality that the internet and online life can introduce. He’s generally more enthused about facebook and twitter and the like than I am — though I go through cycles regarding this and am shifting towards usage again, I think — but he raises a couple interesting points which I grazed by in my post about facebook but, naturally, he gets the point across much better:

We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

There is a level of permanence to your persona that wasn’t there forty years ago. Becoming a new man, à la Don Draper, is hardly feasible in this world where your blog’s archive sits there for all to read, where your twitter updates lay in neat chronological order, where the photos on your facebook page sit waiting to be found and reported on. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. But it’s certainly where we’d headed.