intertwingly

It’s just data

Tasty Creole on a Fat Tuesday Morning


Wikipedia: A creole language, or just creole, is a well-defined and stable language that originated from a non-trivial combination of two or more languages, typically with many distinctive features that are not inherited from either parent. All creole languages evolved from pidgins, usually those that have become the native language of some community.

This is unabashedly a Fat Tuesday metaphor that may only make sense to the author, namely me.  But then again, isn’t that what weblogs are for, after all?

Taking a look at this RSS 2.0 feed that was produced by the Microsoft IE7 subscribe process, I am struck by the fact that it is undeniably a pidgin and to my eye, quite ugly.  It starts with many elements from Netscape’s Rich Site Summary, which in turn borrows an element or two from Dave Winer’s now defunct ScriptingNews format.  It also includes elements from the newer Atom format, and even another two from a Microsoft Extension.  Wordpress RSS 2.0 feeds include the full markup of the content in the post by borrowing an extension from RDF Site Summary DasBlog RSS 2.0 feeds describe content by borrowing an element from xhtml.

With this many ways to include content in a feed, it is entirely unsurprising that how such feeds are interpreted vary wildly from tool to tool, and even vary based on the order in which such elements are included.

I’m reminded of this quote from Douglas Adams, parts of which are attributed to Stephen Pinker:

... They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all.

However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.

The same thing is happening in communication technology...

By contrast, consider Valid Atom 1.0 http://www.atemschutzunfälle.de/asu.xml (view-source), a prime example of fine German Engineering.