More on the Human Readability Smokescreen
Jason Kottke has fallen prey to the siren’s lure of the “human readability” argument:
“If hardcore developers of RSS readers and authoring tools are the only ones technically savvy enough to understand RSS files, the pool of potential memes is limited by the size and narrow focus (not to mention, for the most part, gender) of that group. But if the format is fairly human readable (more like HTML 3.2 markup than, say, Perl code), you’re going to get more people from different backgrounds hacking away at it.”
I posted a pretty extensive response on Jason’s blog, which for my loyal readers (both of you), I have repeated here.
Let’s define which humans we’re really talking about when we say “human readable.” Most humans don’t want to read an RSS file, nor do they want to view HTML source. Only a very small subset of humans (which I will call “geeks” for lack of a better term) are concerned with the underlying formats.
You think the web took off fast because of “view source”? Bah! Think of what would have happened with web publishing in 1995 if there had been an effective way of publishing web sites without having to reverse engineer HTML from “view source” and hand-code your own pages. The web didn’t succeed because of “view source”; the web succeeded in spite of “view source.”
The reliance on people who would reverse engineer HTML source and the concurrent lack of effective personal publishing tools held back the web. Weblog tools revolutionize personal web publishing because they overcome the “view source barrier;” they allow your typical, non-geek human to publish to the web simply and effectively without ever having to view HTML source to do so. Why can’t we expect the same sort of transparency from tools that produce and consume RSS feeds?
So when we speak of “human readable” HTML or RSS, we’re actually talking about “geek readable” formats. And I’m really not concerned about geeks. Anyone who makes the effort to understand RSS certainly has the skills to understand, with a little more effort, RDF. I’m concerned about the users who want to be able to use the web effectively without having to open the hood.
I fear that the adherence to “human (aka geek) readable” as a threshold not to be bypassed puts us dangerously close to getting stuck in the same kind of human-hostile web development environment of 1995, where users who are already experts in carpentry or law or teaching or pastry-making are expected to “view source” to learn complex new skills to participate in web publishing.
Anil is right: the bright orange XML button is a hostile user interface. It implies that you already know what the acronym means and what to do with it; it communicates nothing to non-geek humans. If non-geeks learn to use it, they learned in spite of the interface, not because of it.
The world doesn’t want “human readable” formats and orangle XML branding; the world just wants functionality — “syndicate my content” and “aggregate these other people’s content.” They don’t care about the formats, and they shouldn’t! They should care about dance and medicine and geology and pastries and all the other human specialties, and about communicating all that interesting stuff with each other via the web.
Geeks and developers should care about getting the technology out of their way so they can do it.
(FYI, this exact same debate took place on my weblog last week, albeit with much less heavy-hitters involved.)
Greg,
I liked your comment, very similar to mine own a few comments up. Must be the name ;)
Maybe you have 3 readers now.
I think that “geek readable” might be more important than you think—formats that are easier to understand are easier to generate and process correctly. I don’t have the confidence that you do that most developers that use RSS (or whatever new syndication format comes along) will have the time or inclination to understand the full RDF model. “View Source” isn’t as important to content generators as it is for tool builders, many of whom will never even bother to read the original specs. The success of the format will depend on having a rich ecology of tools that support it, and the harder it is to get the tools right, the more likely it is that there will be incompatibilities and inconsistencies. In fact, I’d say that RSS has succeeded in spite of a variety of complex, incompatible, incomplete formats. :-)
Hi Tim–
I wholeheartedly agree that a format that is accessible to more developers can result in more tools. I’m just not conviced that “maintaining human readability” is justification for not continuing to develop new or existing formats. E.g., several of the RSS 0.9x/2.0 advocates are positioning lack of human readability as an argument againsted RSS 1.0 or Atom/[N]Echo/Pie.
For example, shudder to think where we’d be if PHP, JSP, ASP, Javascript, etc. — all of which add complexity to otherwise “human readable” HTML pages — were all opposed as vehemently as some people are opposing any changes (or alternatives) to RSS on the basis of “human readability.”