the ryan king

A Flickr set of unhappy people at Disneyland.

via:Boing Boing.

Yeah, posted by Cory Doctorow- very ironic.

There’s been a lot of discussion around the Semantic Web and microformats and I’d like to follow up on some comments I’ve received.

It seems that much of the opposition to Microformats amounts to “but RDF|OWL|Whatever is more powerful|expressive|extensible than XHML|micorformats.” (See this comment for an example.)

I agree completely. I don’t think XHTML is nearly as expressive as RDF and Friends.

The problem with such arguments is that they seem to make the power or expressiveness of a particular technology the most important factor, whereas I believe the Web is a platform for *people* to be expressive. So the measure should not be “how expressive is this technology?” but “how much does this encourage and facilitate personal expression?”*

Why?

power != utility

Usefulness is more important than power and we must walk the fine line between power and usability, which is probably exponentially harder than either of the component problems.

Notes

• I do realize that much of the Web (esp. in this Web 2.0 world), is for machine consumption, not human. Yet, I think comprehensibility is still vital(see my comment here). For example, how many people learned HTML by viewing other people’s source? Comprehensible technologies enable innovation.