I thought that McDonough’s article for this week was very informative of a problem that is easy to overlook. Being new to XML, I had no idea that the language’s being designed with variability in mind was making it difficult in terms of interoperability. It is an interesting point that different needs of different library communities are creating social differences in the use and the miscommunication of XML based tools.

I also felt that the author’s call for some sort of standardization runs a little counter to the entire philosophy of XML. As he says, “In the designers’ world view, a key benefit to XML is the freedom it provides users to define their own structure for documents and data, using their own semantics, and to escape restrictions software vendors might wish to impose on their users.” In this way, isn’t standardizing the language to some degree counterintuitive to its design? This is definitely an interesting problem, as I don’t know a potential solution, or even if one is required.

And maybe it’s the comic book lover in me, but I found Walsh’s article (look at all the superheroes!!!) to be very interesting. The idea that a language can be designed that is capable of examining documents with images and text is extremely beneficial for the future.

Reading the article, I kept thinking of the X-Men. As a comic book series, the comics are analogous for the American civil rights movement. This example demonstrates the literary value of such a markup language, but the use for exploring items such as tapestries or other historical documents is obvious. If a historical work makes heavy use of primary sources such as images or maps, an accurate digital rendition could easily live online, either by itself or as a complement to a monograph or other type of publication.