This weekend I was sitting with my friend Kathy Gill at a house warming party and we got onto the subject of the evolution of markup languages. Aside from making most of the geeks in the vicinity cringe at “work talk” on a Saturday, we were running at top speed through the jungle of acronyms that have been spawned by 10+ years of web based markup languages. Until I stumbled. Kathy mentioned (I think it was…) XSLT (or was it something else?) and I drew a complete blank. More than a blank in fact, I completely lost the ability to parse any of the acronyms that we had been using and all connection between the letters and the words that they stood for.
Simple overload. I’ve never been able to reliably type or say RDF rather than RFD and now it seems that I may someday (soon) lose the ability to cope with any acronym.
Can’t happen soon enough as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps if we (I) lose the ability to abbreviate any randomly long obtuse string of words and pretend that the resulting alphabet soup is meaningful we will have to more carefully consider what we name things and strive for concision and meaning in usable packages.