suited to the secure core facilities that we have discussed throughout the course of this book. Specifically, to address more fully the arena of larger scale problems, it was necessary to evolve Java to allow cross sandbox communication. This, unfortunately, had the tendency to abrogate the strengths presented by sandboxes in the first place. Perhaps more detrimental however was the lack of system level establishment of inter-sandbox trust mechanisms. In other words, the evolved Java presented much the same set of problems that computer networks in general have in supporting human social ecosystem facilities related to identity and belonging.

Languages of Cognition

The programming languages that we have briefly considered up to this point have the consistent aim of defining procedural flows through which distinct states of a computer, including its various sensori-motor components, are transitioned from one state to the next. In the course of these transitions, human level sensori-motor information is translated to and from the computer sensori-motor environment. Any reasoning that we can do about this information is constrained to the procedural flows that we define through these programming languages. In order for computers to aim towards functioning at what we might think of as a higher cognitive level, it would be useful to have at our disposal language constructs that facilitate reasoning about such information through the procedural flows created with the more classical programming languages. We might think of such languages as cognition languages. The primary evolutionary path for such languages has been a succession of what are termed markup languages. In Chapter 5 we presented the role of the Extended Markup Language, or XML, in the evolution of computer content. Before we see the role of XML beyond content, i.e. as a conveyor of cognition, let’s look at a brief history of this breakthrough language.

Markup languages began with the creation of the Generalized Markup Language at IBM during the 1960’s. The idea came from something that is now very familiar to any user of Microsoft Word, and surely, most of our readers are in this category. When writing in Word, we point to a specific piece of text in our document, and we label it as “Title”, “Paragraph”, “Footnote”, and the like. Nowadays, we do that using a pull-down menu on our screen, but in the 1960’s and 1970’s, this was done by introducing labels in the text itself. For example, with the Generalized Markup Language, we would put in our text something like:

When this was printed in its final form, we would not see the “:title.” part. What we would see is “Computer Theology” at the proper place in the document, say centered, at the top of the first page, in large fonts. Now, you are going to ask, how did the computer know what to do with that “:title.” tag? Well, this was specified separately, so that many documents could share the same definition for a title, ensuring uniformity in all documents produced by, say, a company or an individual.

While the idea is simple enough, we will see that it would eventually contribute to the revolution of the World Wide Web. However, before getting there, we pass through the 1980’s. By that time, there was a proliferation of text annotation languages similar to the Generalized Markup Language. It was time to put some order in the mayhem, and the International Standards Organization eventually published a comprehensive standard called, appropriately, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879). Using SGML, we would define the title as follows:

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