A universal language is needed that can describe any document to every computer. Right now, the leading candidate for such a beast is SGML … [which] faces growing competition from newer, privately backed solutions like Adobe’s Acrobat … SGML and its competitors embody fundamentally opposed philosophies. Which system wins in the marketplace will profoundly affect the shape and usefulness of future digital libraries … If we follow the lesson of HTML, tempering HyTime’s scientific idealism with a sense of market realism, we should end up with a universal language for multimedia documents, available to both graphic designers and librarians. The result will be the richly woven, accessible digital libraries that Negroponte envisions.
Predictor: Silverman, David
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 column for Wired magazine, David Silverman, chief scientist for the Innodata Corporation of New York and vice president of the International SGML Group, writes: ”Nicholas Negroponte, Wired’s back-page sage, suggests that the government requires that ‘each item submitted to the Library of Congress be accompanied by its digital source.’ It’s a nice idea, but with current technology, the result would be disastrous. Some books would be formatted in ASCII, some in Microsoft Word, others in obsolete formats long-forgotten. It would be a library of Babel: brimming with information, most of it unintelligible. A universal language is needed that can describe any document to every computer. Right now, the leading candidate for such a beast is SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). Although SGML has been an international standard since 1986, only recently has it started to gain widespread acceptance. And SGML now faces growing competition from newer, privately backed solutions like Adobe’s Acrobat. What makes the race for a universal language so important is that SGML and its competitors embody fundamentally opposed philosophies. Which system wins in the marketplace will profoundly affect the shape and usefulness of future digital libraries … A multimedia extension to SGML, known as HyTime, has already been accepted by the International Organization for Standards; it offers a sophisticated, elegant way to deal with documents that combine video and audio. HyTime also allows for more interesting links between documents than the basic point-and-go links currently on the Web. If we follow the lesson of HTML, tempering HyTime’s scientific idealism with a sense of market realism, we should end up with a universal language for multimedia documents, available to both graphic designers and librarians. The result will be the richly woven, accessible digital libraries that Negroponte envisions.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Language/Interface/Software
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Geek Page: Toward a Universal Library
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.08/geek.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney