Master Foo's Taxation Theory of Microformats
One bright spring morning in 2006, a delegation of knowledge management experts arrived at the zenith of Pentimenti mountain to meet with Master Foo. Their trip to the mountain top had been a noisy one, featuring a non-stop debate about ontologies, RDF, XML and the Semantic Web.
As they approached him, Master Foo stuffed lumps of his flowing gray beard into his ears to drown out the noise. The knowledge management experts on seeing this, fell silent and sat down.
"Are you familiar", Master Foo began, "with the concept of Value Added Tax?".
The experts were taken aback by this question. Coming from anybody else other than Master Foo, it would have elicited a dismissive response. However, Master Foo's reputation for bizarre analogies was well known to the experts.
"It is a form of taxation in which the value chain itself collects tax on behalf of government.", one of the experts explained. "Enterprises that buy goods to sell on, can re-claim the value added tax (VAT). Only the final consumer actually pays the VAT."
"Indeed", said Master Foo. "Only the consumer pays the VAT. Now, pretend that complexity in information systems is a form of taxation. Would the VAT model be an appropriate model?"
"Hmmm. I don't think so", another expert began. "In information systems, complexity is normally spread out along the value chain. If I publish some information in a custom XML format for example, all consumers and intermediaries who process that information have to pay the XML complexity tax. They need to know about my custom schema, about validation, about stylesheets, about transformation and so on."
"Indeed", said Master Foo. "Now who benefits from the fact that the information is in XML?"
"Well, everyone benefits", responded the expert, puffing out his chest. "Structured information is fundamentally more useful than unstructured information all the way up and down the value chain!"
Master Foo stroked his beard. "But what if I just want to see a piece of information or print it or search it or e-mail it or copy/paste it into my word processor? Should I have to pay the XML complexity tax for these simple requirements?"
"Well..., no, I suppose not.", replied the expert, wondering what sort of trouble he was letting himself in for with this answer.
"Complexity is like taxation.", Master Foo began. "Producers and consumers alike will always see a tax as unfair unless they can see benefits to themselves in paying it. XML - as classically articulated - suffers from the fact that the costs and benefits associated with its usage occur in different places in the value chain. As a publisher, I will definitely benefit from XML but as a consumer, I will only benefit from it if I have (a) technical expertise and (b) non-trivial integration requirements. If I just want to print or search or e-mail or copy/paste, the XML appears to be an unfair complexity tax to me."
"But Master Foo", a third expert began, "we all agree that the simple things should be simple and that the hard things should be possible.
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