The Merit and Love of Lightweight Markup Languages

The believe that graphic user interface (GUI) provide simplicity and easiness located at the top list of false belief of our time; not only it is untrue but also poses a lot of unnecessary trouble upon us. Perhaps, with a good guess, what catch people to use WYSIWYGs, is GUI, the possibility of select the text and push a small visualized icon in the toolbar, and see the formatted text preview immediately; all this process would be done before our eyes; just like many software list drag-and-drop option as a feature. Actually, seeing the process in the runtime could be an option for many people, but if it was the reason for using WYSIWYGs instead of lightweight markups, the one could say this is one of the strangest things in the world. Here is the reason: at the end of the day all those visual objects compiled in machine codes with just 0/1, which is located at the edge of abstraction. therefore, as far as the IT is the subject matter, could we say GUI (Graphic User Interface) is a feature? I do not think so; in any scale such an attitude ends up in a chronic, fatal alienation; here is why.

The "Age of Information" and Visualization

Relating public reception of property markup languages to their processor is not just a reckless guess but we all are able to see that phenomenon; it was stated above that it is essentially a serious kind of alienation. By Alienation I mean forgetting the roots, the origins that recreate and reproduce all things which are the very foundation of technological world; as far as we are speaking about IT any fundamental inclination to GUI should be understand as a misdirection. If, for example, a car company print the map and resources for repairing the engines in charts and visual objects that must be excellent; but when it comes to IT things get changed. We are live in the era that whose prominent feature is IT, to the extent that Manuel Castells, French sociologist, described it in his trilogy book, The Information Age, as:

"Toward the end of the second millennium of the Christian era several events of historical significance transformed the social landscape of human life. A technological revolution, centered around information technologies, began to reshape, at accelerated pace, the material basis of society." (1)

quoted line is the first line of the first volume of Castells's book, which is published towards the end of twentieth century; I am not sure if he had the Christian connotation of "millennium" in that statement, however, it, by itself, without any association, is clear that the history of homo sapiens has changed radically. if so, and if IT is based on machine code which only could be understand in terms of different length strings made out of 0 and 1, or any binary model, then does not it just nonsense if the majority avoid strings (codes) and prefer something more seeable alternative? I, for one, cannot even think about any kind of denial to this question; it is nonsense for sure. Although, retracing or just try to retrace the roots of such a public tendency may shed light on it. To do that I have to stop here and provide a few premises first.

The Hoax of Chinese Ideogram

Once upon a time, there was a fictional doctrine, but claimed itself scientific, that Chinese language writing system is not morphological, subsequently phonetic, but ideographic, working by ideograms. So to speak, unlike Indo-European languages, in Chinese writing system a letter symbolizes an idea in a visual, sensible way. A morphological system is based on morphemes, different linguistic meaningful units (consist of letters) that are not mimic anything natural; Those morphemes represent Phonetic alphabetic letters, scripts, that rely on speech; When one or more letters appeared, their morpheme (meaningful lexical units/words) revoke spoken word and the reader/listener decode that word into speech and understand it. On the other side, for ideographic system, the letters represent the whole idea in a magical way that immediately present themselves to human understanding; hence the speech level will be bypassed. This could be exemplified as: a graphic symbol with a human shape with feminine dress above a door is an ideogram that conveys a message: "women only"; this meaning expressed in ideographic way. While, if instead of that sign there will be just two written words, i.e. "women only" it carries the message in morphological (/phonetic) way. back to the topic, a hoax, an interesting belief, was popular in the end of ninetieth and the beginning of twentieth centuries that Chinese language, and even Japanese and Korean languages, are ideographic; many eye-oriented scholars found this untrue claim fascinating and saw bases for proving their theories within it. It was just an ignorance about Chinese language; although before further advancement that proved it false, it shaped many movements, mostly promoting graphic-base attitude. The story of Ideogram has a lot to tell us, not just because it was wrong claim but rather, an ideographic system of writing is impossible.

Show Me, Then I Understand

Unsurprisingly, the ideogram lie fooled a lot of people including scholars that supposed to know about the essence of language and meaning, the fact that an ideographic system is not able to hold and distribute meaning in statement level; famous philosopher Hannah Arendt will be a good example. In her great book, The Life of the Mind, when she went on to discuss metaphor mentioned that false claim in details and confused herself between a few things:

"These observations on the interconnection of language and thought, which make us suspect that no speechless thought can exist, obviously do not apply to civilizations where the written sign rather than the spoken word is decisive and where, consequently, thinking itself is not soundless speech but mental dealing with images. This is notably true of China, whose philosophy may well rank with the philosophy of the Occident. There “the power of words is supported by the power of the written sign, the image,” and not the other way round, as in the alphabetic languages, where script is thought of as secondary, no more than an agreed-upon set of symbols. For the Chinese, every sign makes visible what we would call a concept or an essence—Confucius is reported to have said that the Chinese sign for “dog” is the perfect image of dog as such, whereas in our understanding “no image could ever be adequate to the concept” of dog in general." (2)

she even went farther more to claim:

"the answer to the typically Socratic question What is friendship? is visibly present and evident in the emblem of two united hands, and “the emblem liberates a whole stream of pictorial representations” through plausible associations by which images are joined together." (3)

Poor Socrates! had not realized such an easy way. These words are able to provoke any mind to admit the value and efficiency of ideogram; what on the earth could be more precious than such a effective, easy-to-understand way of ideogram! although, always deliberation and patience are more effective. Since the middle of twentieth century there have been an increasing mainstream promoting image and imagery things, whatever it be; Thus, even contemporary approaches to metaphor and figurative speech dominated by visual kinds of those. As I am not going to philosophizing here, let us just be clear about two things: language and its related products, or by-products, (e.g. thoughts) is one thing, and system of writing is another one; these two always must be distinguished; even if a metaphor is imagery, fictional, or triggering imagination in a pure visual way, does not implicate that it should be in "pictorial" scripts. All people, perhaps from all cultures and languages and writing systems, could enter imagination world by reading a few word in phonetic letters.We had better to wait and see more statements:

"These differences between concrete thinking in images and our abstract dealing with verbal concepts are fascinating and disquieting—I have no competence to deal with them adequately. They are perhaps all the more disquieting because amid them we can clearly perceive one assumption we share with the Chinese: the unquestioned priority of vision for mental activities. This priority, as we shall see shortly, remains absolutely decisive throughout the history of Western metaphysics and its notion of truth. What distinguishes us from them is not nous but logos, our necessity to give account of and justify in words. All strictly logical processes, such as the deducing of inferences from the general to the particular or inductive reasoning from particulars to some general rule, represent such justifications, and this can be done only in words." (4)

now the defect is obvious: Arendt did not continue her thoughts enough and stop in meaning of single words; But what about the meaning of statements? here the ideogram collapse. Defining a dog by a picture of a dog is more straightforward than defining it as "a mammal with a long snout similar to wolf"; But what if we want to express that "a dog is dangerous"? A picture of a dog would be good for the word "dog", as well as in one or another way some pictorial sign could be figured out for "dangerous", but how could "is", the copula (linking word), be implied? suppose, one say: "no need to do that; just a picture of a dog and another picture for danger bear the meaning that a dog is dangerous." This seems good point, as in many languages (to name one Arabic) there is not copula, but it does not solve the problem. Because, if existing two pictorial sign means affirmative (positive) proposition, then how denial (negative) statements expressed? a picture of a dog and a pictorial sign for danger means "dog is dangerous", in that case, how "dog is not dangerous" could be stated? while other options should be considered but in the end there is no way for it; since figuring out ways for questions, orders and prays are more difficult. Before continuing this, far from impossibility of ideographic system of writing, it has to be mentioned that the claim of ideogram demolished scientifically first by John DeFrancis, in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (5), then the fatal attack by J. Marshall Unger, particularly in his "The Very Idea; The Notion of Ideogram in China and Japan" (6).

The Deception of Graphics

so far, it has been demonstrated that GUI and its deep root, ideogram, are most accepted false idea among IT world; To see the view in its clearest way, suppose, ignore the impossibility of ideographic languages, and try to use a kind of ideograms for translating a couple of complicating sentences, like this one: _"In my childhood, before a dog attacked me, I had thought dogs are not dangerous." this sentence is one sentence and all parts are related to others authentically; if we try to use pictorial units for convey it, which could not be possible totally, after a few steps a mess of ideograms would be before us. In earlier stages it is easy, just prepare a handful visual signs of baby and adult human and a dog; when it arrives at middle stages a lot of repeated signs appeared. what did happen? nothing, just the core of plainness of graphic revealed. the deception of GUI is like that: makes the first steps easy, but lost its easiness soon. You can see it for yourself: Just try to build a website with a drag-and-drop application like Bootstrap Studio or Google Web Design. In a few seconds the layout and starting codes will be made; also, the skeleton of the website shaped in a few minutes. After this point any change in design cause a real trouble: changing one thing, leads to deshaping the whole architecture; for any small change you have to correct existed elements. This point clarify the merit of lightweight markup languages over its competitors.

Hardware Requirements and Markups

Lightweight markups needs a minimum hardware requirements; they work on any system even old ones or small embedded systems with limited resources; I do think of it as a merit for lightweight markups and all kinds of lightweight software. Having said such a statement for a title like this, might trigger minds to wonder why hardware requirements would an issue at all? the answer lay in some grounds.

Ecosystem Sustainability

First, environmental crisis implications which play a pivotal role in ecosystem sustainability; For a markup like docx, one should upgrade the hardware every two three years, otherwise she/he face a slow and buggy system. It is obvious for any small hardware we use, sometimes waste, a lot of unique natural resources usually nonrenewable; The old hardware, not only should be throw away, but also they are a kind of pollution in nature. Does it meaningless if we seek an efficient, alternative to decrease the rate of wasting natural resources and produce less pollution for the ecosystem?

The Case of Under Developing Countries and Social Lower Class

Technological electronic hardwares are expensive and they are not very accessible for people from lower class, even for middle classes, and most of citizens of under developing countries; that means upgrading hardware would not be an easy decision. We are not in middle ages andd we do not hold beliefs like the family blood play a role; Hence depriving a significant portion of individuals from technology means that we waste a lot of smart brains, just because they are not with good income. In addition, it means that many children and young people lost fair opportunity due to their family income.

Back to the main subject, note it worthy that I am not saying that just a heavy markup ends up in hardware upgrade, but any common sense understand that the idea of lightweightness once encouraged somewhere it would spread all over the realm.

references:

1. Manuel Castells (2010)The Information Age vol. I: Economy, Society, and Culture; The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell Publishing Ltd; ISBN: 978-1-4051-9686-4. first edition and second one published respectively in 1996 and 2000.
2. Arendt, Hannah (1978) The Life Of the Mind, USA: Harcourt inc. p. 101
3. Ibid
4. Op. Cit. p. 101-102
5. DeFrancis, John (1984) "The Ideographic Myth", in: The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by ,University of Hawai`i Press. here is online link
6. Unger, J. Marshall (1990) "The Very Idea; The Notion of Ideogram in China and Japan", Monumenta Nipponica; Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), pp. 391-411 (21 pages); https://doi.org/10.2307/2385377. Unger has other writings on the issue but this one is enough for our purpose.