[LAD] minimal LV2

[Paul Davis]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 4:17 PM,  <fons at kokkinizita.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 12:58:11PM -0400, Jeremy wrote:
>
>> I would like to add that as a beginner to LV2 plugins, I found the use of
>> urls to be *extremely* confusing.
>
> Glad to know I'm not the only one.

i think that the problem here is not an unusual one. there is a
disconnect between people who have thought a little bit about
something, and people who have thought a lot about the same thing.
this doesn't mean that the latter group is right and the former group
is wrong. but look, issues of how to add metadata to online/software
entities have been a focus of various parts of academia and industrial
R&D-ish types for many, many years. the design of LV2's metadata
reflects some part of the general conclusions that this sort of work
(nowadays "the semantic web") have come up with.

if you want to argue that this design is wrong in general, i think you
have an uphill battle (although you will find allies in parts of the
semantic web world). if you want to argue that its overblown in this
particular case, then i think its fairly important to show why the
considerations that lead to this RDF/turtle-ish kind of thing don't
apply to the case of describing plugins.

you know, as a beginner to quite a lot of things, i found them
confusing. as i got more experienced with them, in many (most?) cases
i ended up understanding why the design was the way it was.
confusing-for-beginners is not really a particularly compelling
argument against something that really isn't supposed to be the focus
of a beginner's experience anyway. but people being people, they find
the one or two things that seem confusing and then zoom in on that,
ignoring its real significance and purpose in the general scheme of
things.

the fact that a generation or more of programmers have grown up not
really grasping the difference between a URL and a URI is a problem,
and its not one that LV2 is here to solve.

> I'm more and more convinced that people creating these sort of
> thing entertain the illusion that they somehow create meaning
> while there is none. It looks more like an extreme form of
> illiteracy, a complete failure to convey meaning in a form that
> makes sense to a human.

people who don't understand any field of formal jargon say the same
thing about that jargon. these descriptions are formal jargon. you're
not meant to "just get them" by just looking at them. they are also
not there to convey meaning to a human, although an interested human
could discover something from them.

--p