Only the Schema Matters
As I said last time, I didn't "get" Xpertweb until
I read the World of Ends Declaration.
In making Xpertweb "WoE-compliant",
as Doc put it,
I mimicked WoE's point 8—based on Doc's NEA construct:
8. The three virtues of the Xpertweb agreement:
- a. No one owns it
- You can't own an agreement. It lives at the intersection of your promises.
- b. Everyone can use it
- Like the web, you'll need some code and a little training, but that's what
Mentors are for.
- c. Anyone can improve
it
- Don't like the rev 1.0 PHP business forms? Roll your own in Fortran. Only
the schema matters.
The reason the schema is the big deal is that it does for
economics what all the Internet's equipment does for electronic
transmissions—enforce an agreement on how to play nice with each other.
That's a bracing thought: unlike anyone else, Xpertweb people are subject
to an overarching
economic
agreement enforced by forms and scripts conforming to their agreement.
As you've learned by now, the larger economy has no rules
and few ethics. Like the wild west, people do whatever they can get away
with—pretty much anything.
Let's review what World of Ends teaches us.
Tale of WoE
Doc and the Doctor have
reduced the Internet to its essence,
which is how we can finally get it that the Internet is only an agreement.
The parties to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
have agreed to distill our words and our longings into
ASCII
chunks
of a
certain
size and format, and route them according to certain rules. You
also abide by your agreement to do so every time you log on to the Internet.
What's that you say? You don't remember making that agreement?
Neither do I. To save us all a lot of trouble, every Internet black box
and switch and chip and router and software program conforms to the agreement
called
the Internet.
If they didn't, it wouldn't. If a data packet doesn't conform to the
IP agreement, it's not an IP packet, so it's just ignored.
This is a big deal. We've come to a point in our culture that
we can reduce our obligations to code so we don't have to worry about breaking
the rules.
Economic Rules For the Best of Us
You probably know better than I that a schema is a rule book
for XML file structure and XML is a way to organize information so it's readable
by machines and people. By putting all Xpertweb data out in the
open on its user's sites, the Xpertweb protocols let all its users know about
all its users. When people use the Xpertweb tools, they also use the schema's
rules, which are based on the standard Xpertweb
Mentor Agreement. It's a work in progress, but you get the idea.
And just as a packet isn't an IP packet unless it conforms
to the agreement, neither is a transaction an Xpertweb transaction unless
its records conform to the schema and are present on the sites of both the
seller and the buyer.
When we get all these tools hammered out, there'll be two
kinds of economy. The huge one we use now, with no stated rules, and the
tiny micreconomy we're designing here, with explicit rules for those who
choose to abide by them, and a way to add others rapidly.
Then we'll find out how many of us prefer to play by the rules.
10:27:58 PM 
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