<- Yuri Rubinsky -> Since our last meeting, our community has lost a wise counselor, a true Renaissance man, and a very good friend. I'd like to begin with a short reading in memory of Yuri Rubinsky. I've adapted it from a poem called "Come Labor On", originally written in 1859 by Jane Laurie Borthwick.
Come! labor on! Who dares stand idle on the harvest plain While all around us waves the golden grain, And our inner voices say, "Go! Work today!"
Come, labor, on. Claim the high calling angels cannot share; To blind and sighted, liberation bear. Redeem the time; its hours too swiftly fly. The night draws nigh.
Come labor, on. Away with gloomy doubts and faithless fear! No arm so weak but may do service here; Though feeble agents, may we all fufill The worthwhile tasks undone still.
Come! Labor on! No time for rest, till glows the western sky. Till the long shadows o'er our pathways lie. And a glad sound comes with the setting sun, "Well done, well done!"
Welcome to the Third International HyTime Conference!
I'm afraid I don't have time to read you the program of this conference and tell you how great it's going to be. It is going to be REALLY GREAT, but you'll find that out for yourselves soon enough. Astonishing and wonderful things have happened in HyTime-land since our last meeting, and the program of this conference is organized as a banquet of as much of the most relevant information as we could cram into it.
But first, I have some editorializing to do, and this is the best pulpit I have for editorializing.
This is a portentous moment for HyTime and for SGML, too. The reasons why I say that are probably already obvious to everyone in this room, but I'm going to STEVE them anyway.
The relevance of HyTime to what's actually going on is at an all time high. The need for HyTime has never been greater, it has never been more obvious what HyTime has to offer, and the business opportunity HyTime represents has never been greater.
And yet HyTime is being totally ignored by the media, and is all but totally ignored by the big players.
Netscape Navigator <- HTML -> Netscape is pointedly ignoring SGML, let alone HyTime, as we can all plainly see in its technology offerings and other words and deeds. In fact, I'm told that Netscape's leadership is on record as being opposed to SGML as the vehicle for information interchange on the Web. Netscape's so-called "enhancements" to HTML do grave violence to SGML and, therefore, to the whole idea of sharing self-describing information around the globe. Netscape's attitude is self-destructive; they think they are burning everyone else's furniture, but, inadvertently, they are burning their own furniture too. I wish they would wake up and smell the furniture.
<- World Wide Web -> <- Microsoft -> One can hardly blame Netscape's leadership, however, for following the ultra-successful historical business model of Microsoft Corporation. I would describe that model as: "control everything," and its guiding philosophy, "It is not enough to be rich; it is also necessary to be far and away the richest, even if that means doing whatever is necessary to make one's competitors poor." The fact that Microsoft finds itself fighting a losing battle with a competitor who is only following Microsoft's historical example is a delicious irony, isn't it? -- but nobody's laughing. Microsoft is certainly not laughing, because its dominance in personal information processing software could easily and rapidly disappear in the withering glare of the World Wide Web and universal connectivity. For the big players, the World Wide Web has created a situation in which any of them could be blindsided and engulfed by the competition. The rest of us are not laughing because the question of what to buy, and whom to trust with our information assets, is no longer simple or easy.
<- World Wide Web -> <- Microsoft -> Netscape It is often said that business is war, and, nowadays, business is probably the only battleground on which some sort of planetary hegemony can be achieved. The question I'd like for everyone in the world to consider is this: is hegemony over the world's information assets something that any private interest should have? I think Netscape, with reportedly 90% of the browsers in use, would answer, "Yes. We're winning fair and square. Let the consumer decide." Microsoft says "Yes," too, but it is making a very differently shaded answer to this question. Microsoft says, in effect, "Yes, hegemony should belong to a consortium of private interests ostensibly working together for the benefit of everyone." (This answer, by the way, is a matter of record, and it is currently available from http://www.microsoft.com/internet/html.htm in the form of a pledge from Microsoft to support and abide by the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium. Microsoft challenges Netscape to make the same pledge.)
Unix systems <- World Wide Web -> <- Microsoft -> <- W3C Consortium -> Microsoft is moving in the right direction, but it must move farther. It is playing the same game that the Unix vendors attempted, unsuccessfully, to play against Microsoft: gang up against the biggest bully and disguise the true nature of the consortium by making it a nonprofit organization populated with idealistic young people who really feel that they are Doing the Right Thing by Opposing the Evil Empire. It didn't work for the Unix vendors, and, personally, I see little reason to think it will work for Microsoft. In fact, it's just the same old story of one armed camp against another, and, as in wars between nations, there is no one to provide any adult supervision. The fact that Microsoft is a member of the W3C consortium in no way diminishes the fact that the consortium is, inevitably, the instrument of its overpoweringly heavyweight members, especially Microsoft. The World Wide Web Consortium asks us to believe that, while accepting huge dues payments from its members, it acts on behalf of all mankind. It may even be true, in many ways and in many cases. But if Microsoft said, "We're going to use HyTime," it seems impossible that the World Wide Web Consortium would be able to say, "No, we're not." It would be similarly impossible for the World Wide Web Consortium to adopt HyTime if Microsoft said, "No" to HyTime.
<- W3C Consortium -> Just for rhetorical effect, let me ask my question again: "Is hegemony over the world's information assets something that any private interest should have?" The W3C is an example of a "private interest." Should the W3C have hegemony over the world's information assets? Personally, I don't think so. The W3C was self-appointed. It derives no legitimate authority, directly or indirectly, from any act of any generally elected leadership. The Consortium's cohesion, let alone its effectiveness, is seriously threatened by the war between its members.
AT&T IBM <- Microsoft -> Viacom "Is hegemony over the world's information assets something that any private interest should have?" What if Microsoft loses its war with Netscape? Do we want Netscape, with its arrogant and wanton disrespect for the international treaties on which the SGML standard is based, to become the arbiter of the characteristics of interchangeable information? If I were Microsoft, or IBM, or Paramount, or Viacom, or AT&T, I'd be pretty worried about this possibility right now.
<- World Wide Web -> <- ISO -> <- Microsoft -> It's a good thing we're in Seattle, and I certainly hope there are opinion-makers from Microsoft in this audience, and I certainly hope they are listening right now. Microsoft has a clear opportunity, right now, this minute, not only to do the thing that is in its own best interests, but also the thing that is in everyone's best interests. In addition to wrapping itself in the idealistic vision that the World Wide Web Consortium represents, it needs to go the rest of the distance, and act to place control over the interchangeability of information in the hands of the people of the world. Microsoft should embrace its obligations as a statesman on the world stage, and become a supporting member of the only relevant organization that represents the interests of, and is responsible only to, the community of nations that occupy this planet. I refer, of course, to the International Organization for Standardization, better known as the ISO. Microsoft now has the power, and, perhaps only for a short time, absolutely to prevent any company, including itself, from gaining the kind of deadly, self-corrupting power that de facto hegemony over the interchangeability of information would bring to any private interest. It should do so while it has the chance.
<- ISO -> <- Microsoft -> <- HTML -> Microsoft has already made the first step: it has announced its intention to support SGML, hedgingly described as the "parent" of HTML in the public pledge I alluded to earlier. The rest of the steps would include acknowledging the source of SGML -- the ISO --, and, as a start, making a corporate priority of participating in the relevant committees of American National Standards Institute and the ISO. To do Microsoft any good, these delegates must be the cream of the crop, technically sharp people, with good interpersonal and communications skills, who can contribute meaningfully to the ongoing evolution of the SGML family of standards, including HyTime. Microsoft needs to announce its commitment to the ISO process as the best available way to create and adopt truly open standards for the benefit of humanity at large. This will have the much-needed effect of getting the news media to pay attention to, learn about, and, in turn, inform the public about, the huge range of issues involved in information interchange.
Winston Churchill (By the way, when I say the ISO process is the best available way to make international standards, I do not mean that it is necessarily a very good way. To paraphrase Winston Churchill's rueful remark about government by democracy: The ISO process is a very bad way to make standards; the trouble is, all the others are so much worse!)
(By the way, is there anyone here I haven't offended yet?)
<- Microsoft -> By taking steps to embrace and influence the ISO process, Microsoft will demonstrate that it has grown up and is now capable of providing adult supervision. Instead of acting on a childish need to "control everything," it can show responsibility by making sure that control over the syntax and semantics of information interchange is not too concentrated, and is placed in the hands of people who are responsible to every faction and nation on earth. Instead of acting on a childish emotional need to be the very richest, even when being richest means making others poor, it can be acting on the wisest moral imperative of all: to act conscientiously for the benefit of everyone, including oneself.
<- HTML -> What will it mean for there to be a worldwide pool of self-describing information -- far more sophisticated than HTML in its ability to describe itself -- to be universally available? If this happens, my optimism about the destiny of humanity is boundless. What will be the cost if some kinds of information are not allowed to describe themselves, and, therefore can't be interchanged efficiently? Personally, I don't even want to think about it. Maybe a cure for cancer will be delayed another year, or another hundred years. Maybe misunderstandings will lead, again, to worldwide wars. Maybe our scientists and drug companies won't be able to react fast enough to avoid the decimation of humanity by some new airborne plague. Friends, it's simply unthinkable. Civilization is too delicate and complicated, and it gets more so all the time. We can't afford these risks just so there can be a clear winner in the information business.
<- HTML -> What does all this have to do with HyTime? It's certainly too obvious to point out that HyTime, and not HTML, is capable of creating the possibility of exchanging _arbitrary_ abstract semantics without regard to technologies -- proprietary or otherwise. HyTime, and not HTML, is the only way to exchange hypermedia documents that has been adopted by the international community of nations. HyTime, and not HTML, extends, rather than curtails, the power of SGML, HTML's so-called "parent" standard.
<- HTML -> But wait, there's more. HyTime, or rather ISO 10744, with its ability to model information in an object oriented fashion, and to formalize enabling architectures, is capable of supporting any number of self-describing HyTime-like architectures. HyTime could be used to rescue HTML from its ongoing disintegration, by formalizing HTML as just such an architecture, while preserving HTMLs ability to be locally and proprietarily enhanced and extended with formal, parsable, intelligible architectures rigorously derived from the HTML architecture.
<- World Wide Web -> If embraced by the World Wide Web Consortium, SGML and HyTime can become a much-needed source of the Consortium's legitimacy, while maintaining and extending its moral authority to create and promulgate conventions regarding browsers, applications, enhancements, extensions, derived enabling architectures, and derived encompassing architectures. (We're going to explain the latter two terms later this morning.)
<- HTML -> It's true that HyTime, because of its immense generality, is much harder to implement than HTML, just as real SGML is harder to implement than HTML. But it's far from impossible. If TechnoTeacher can do it, Microsoft and the other members of the W3C can do it, too. Furthermore, as you're going to see in detail today and tomorrow, after the Technical Corrigendum, the implementation of HyTime can now be accomplished more or less by cookbook.
Finally, I conclude by pleading with each of you, as individuals who are opinion makers and who are, unfortunately, among the very few who know the truth about HyTime. Each of you can make an important difference, and maybe a vital difference. After this conference is over, we're going to post all the conference materials that our speakers will allow us to post on the internet. Please make the case for HyTime wherever you think someone might be listening. Especially make the case to the media. Write letters. Make phone calls. Post notes in news groups. Educate the public. Some of us do this all the time. We need your help, and we really need your help NOW. In a hypermedia world, SGML can't succeed if nobody knows what HyTime is, and, right now, nobody does. Each of us has a moral duty to correct that situation.