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We will delve much more deeply into the mechanisms and facilities of institutions providing content in the next chapter. For the moment, we merely want to recognize that transaction-specific policy is currently a function specific to each individual server that facilitates access to content, in all its various forms. Based on examples found in other social ecosystems, we suggest a number of evolutionary changes that can be anticipated in this domain.

Future Architectures

Current content architectures operate successfully due to a lot of faith and a large amount of goodwill on the part of users. The level of malicious users (and faux-content providers) is accelerating, bringing a number of services into serious jeopardy under current usage models. The amount of e-mail spam is rapidly approaching a serious system failure on at least two levels. First, network bandwidth of both telecommunication channels and of content servers is being consumed more rapidly than the current cost models enable increasing capacity. Second, and probably more damaging, the entire trust model of the system is being called into question. If we reach a point where significant amounts of content cannot be trusted, then the utility of the network is in jeopardy.

One of the major evolutionary pressures is toward independent operation of the personal electronic device trusted core. At the present time, the usage models require too much support from non-trusted platforms for their trusted core to operate. Consequently, the trust conveyance by the personal electronic device from its trusted core to the content provider can become suspect.

The major technological enhancements that we see in future content systems derive in two main areas: first, establishing the independence of personal electronic devices, and second, providing enhanced facilities for the specification and implementation of content specific policy. The first of these areas we will consider in detail in Chapter 9 and the second in Chapter 10. For the moment, however, we need to introduce what we see as the underlying foundation of such policy; that is, a universal policy language component. As we know that many readers didn’t bargain for a lesson in the technological bases of computing in buying this book, we want to emphasize that they don’t need to read the following to understand our book. However, we’re trying to make the concepts as easy to grasp as possible, and we trust that most of you will enjoy learning about the fundamentals of the generations of computers to come.

We now need to introduce a language that is widely used in the computer world: the Extensible Markup Language, or XML. This language provides us with a way in which plain English can be structured sufficiently to convey details to a computer. It is the central tool of services delivered over the World Wide Web. This language was developed over decades to culminate into a lingua franca of the Web. What makes XML so important is that it is the first self-describing computer language meant to be distributed over the network, and actually the first computer language reaching the expressing capability of natural language. Moreover, as you’ll see, it is quite easy to understand.

We will take an example to which anybody can relate, that of an employee whose supervisor changes. Let’s see how computers carry this transaction.

To start with, a computer can say in XML:

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