I have met my match. I cede any right to claim to have ranted in the
past. This is art.
http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
And he has more, see links at the bottom of the page.
As much as I feel rants are cathartic and even a noble literary
expression, some surpass
even these frail goals. This and others elevate rants into the sublime.
Here is an example or two:
| Basically XML is just another way of writing S-expr or Trees or
| whatever you want to call it.
They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are
more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery
is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another
way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way
of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps.
There are some things in life that you do not do if you want to be a
moral being and feel proud of what you have accomplished.
.. and ..
I once believed that it would be very beneficial for our long-term
information needs to adorn the text with as much meta-information as
possible. I still believe that the world would be far better off if
it had evolved standardized syntactic notations for time, location,
proper names, language, etc, and that even prose text would be
written in such a way that precision in these matters would not be
sacrificed, but most people are so obsessively concerned with their
immediate personal needs that anything that could be beneficial on a
much larger scale have no chance of surviving. Look at the United
States of America, with its depressingly moronic units instead of
going metric, with its inability to write dates in either ascending
or descending order of unit size, and with its insistence upon the
12-hour clock, clearly evidencing the importance of the short-term
pain threshold and resistance to doing anyone else's bidding. And
now the one-time freest nation of the world has turned dictatorship
with a dangerous moron in charge, set to attack Iraq to revenge his
father's loss. Those who laughed when I said that stupidity is the
worst threat to mankind laugh no more; they wait with bated breath
to see if the world's most powerful incoherent moron will launch the
world into a world war simply because he is too fucking stupid. But
what really pisses me off is the spineless American people who fails
to stop this madness. Presidents have been shot and killed before.
I seem to be digressing -- the focal point is that the masses, those
who exert no effort to better themselves, cannot be expected to help
solve any problems larger than their own, and so they must be forced
by various means, such as compulsory education, spelling checkers,
newspaper editors who do /not/ publish their letters to the editor,
and not least by the courts that restrain the will to revenge, in
order to keep a modicum of sanity in the frail structure that is
human society. We are clearly not at the stage of human development
where writers are willing to accept the burden of communicating to
the machine what they are thinking. One has to marvel at the wide
acceptance of our existing punctuation marks and the sociology of
their acceptance. "Tagging" text for semantic constructs that the
human mind is able to discern from context must be millennia off.
.. finally ..
In many ways, the current American presidency and XML have much in
common. Both have clear lineages back to very intelligent people.
Both demonstrate what happens when you give retards the tools of the
intelligent. Some Americans obsess over gun control, to limit the
number of handguns in the hands of their civilians, but support the
most out-of-control nutcase in the young history of the nation and
rally behind his world-threatening abuse of guns. The once noble
concern over validation to curb excessive costs of too powerful a
tool for the people who used it, has turned into an equally insane
abuse of power in the XML world. How could such staggering idiots
as have become "leaders" of the XML world and the free world come to
their power? Clearly, they gain support from the masses who have no
concerns but their immediate needs, no ability to look for long-term
solutions and stability, no desire to think further ahead than that
each individual decision they make be the best for them. Lethargy
and pessimism, lack of long-term goals, apathy towards consequences,
they are all symptoms of depressed people, and it is perhaps no
coincidence that the world economy is now in a depression. My take
on it is that it is because too much growth also rewarded people of
such miniscule intellectual prowess that they turned to fraud rather
than tackle the coming negative trends intelligently. Whether Enron
or W3C or the GOP, everyone knows that fraud does pay in the short
term and that bad money drives out good. When even the staggering
morons are rewarded, the honest and intelligent must lose, and even
the best character will have a problem when being honest means that
he forfeits a chance to received a hundred million dollars. In both
the Bush administration and the W3C standards administration, we see
evidence that large groups of people did not believe that it would
matter who assumed power. I am quite certain that just as Bush is
supposed to be a thoroughly /likable/ person, the people who work up
the most demented "standards" in the W3C lack that personality trait
that is both abrasive and exhibit leadership potential. When the
overall growth of something is so rapid that an idiotic decision no
longer causes any immediate losses, the number of such decisions
will grow without bounds until the losses materialize, such as in an
economic depression. When the losses are so diffused as to not even
affect the idiots behind the decisions, they can stay in power for a
very long time until they are blamed for a large number of ills they
had no power to predict, but that is precisely what caused them.
Humbled, I am in his debt.
-- Owen
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