I spy

In the late '60s there was a late-night TV drama that I used to watch, starring Bob Culp playing a tennis pro and Bill Cosby as his coach. They travelled the world, a-spying. This struck me at the time as a pretty unlikely cover story, but the backchat between the two was quite amusing. My only memory of it involved the two trapped in some kind of storeroom and making an improvised bomb ...

<parenthesis reason="neologism not yet coined">
(this was long before the term "IED" had been coined)
</parenthesis>

...one of whose ingredients was the dry ice used to preserve fresh fish. One of the two was unimpressed by the prospect of this thing working, and poured scorn on his partner's 'cod-fish bomb'...

 <tangent importance-quotient="0">
I forget which, but in my mind's eye I can see Bill Cosby saying it; Bob Culp was the one full of wacky ideas and Bill Cosby was the world-weary sceptic.

<meta-tangent>
(Cosby played Gromit to Culp's Wallace)
</meta-tangent>

</tangent>
.

Not only was it, I thought, an unlikely cover story, but a pretty implausible story-line. 

But the other day I was invited to a talk given by Professor Chris Andrew, a meteorically rising young  (when I first knew him – ten years older than me) Fellow of Corpus and fellow (lower case this time) member of the Gravediggers (a Corpus play-reading society...

<esprit-descalier>

<tangent>
I know it should be d'éscalier, but as I've said before if a conceit is worth anything it's worth doing properly. This non-existent mark-up language...

<meta-tangent>
(incidentally this ["mark-up language"] accounts for all the other       -MLs you may have come across: HTML,  SGML,  XML... and so on [there are dozens]. Mark-up languagers use tags to control the way different bits of text are displayed in various sorts of document [for example, print in a range of formats, help text, other sorts of online text...] This makes it possible for one source document to produce several outputs.)
</meta-tangent>

...would surely have a compiler that would return an error and probably (in the best traditions of computing) fall down in a heap if it found punctuation or diacritics in a tag; that sort of character is often, in geek-speak, "reserved".
</tangent>

 Oh I get it. Corpus/corpse. It's only taken me 50 years...
</esprit-descalier>

... of which I was the Hon Sec. We met once a term, port and rich-tea biscuits), thst sort of thing. Very Cantabrigian.

<autobiographical-note>
One evening I remember a last-minute (pre email, of course) change of venue necessitated a notice in Old Court, decorated with a picture of this provender. A passing worthy added words designed to shame us lotus-eaters by referring to some current horror (probably the Wollo famine): '1 bottle of port would give an Ethiopian family... etc etc'. Not a whit abashed (I 've always wanted to write that) a fellow Gravedigger wrote 'Let them, drink Coke'. Happy days.
</autobiographical-note>

The latest in the good Professor's oeuvre (he is the pre-eminent historian in matters of British espionage) starts:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I wonder if this is where John Le Carré got the idea for the expression 'the Circus'. The introduction goes on:

This strange story put in mind of I Spy.  But the idea of using a form of entertainment as a cover for espionage is not a twentieth-century thing. The intoduction later reads:

But if you want to know the rest of the story (and read all those footnotes, which don't lead anywhere in these screen grabs) you'll have to read the book. That's my lot for tonight.

b

 

Update: 2024.05.11.16:15– Added PS

        <autobiographical_note> 

In the late 1970s and well into the 1980s many IT professionals were working to standardize a markup language ultimately called SGML Some time in the mid-1980s, all the is and ts were respectively dotted and crossed, ducks were aligned, etc when somebody (one of the contributing partners, who – according to colleagues fabled to be in the know in matters relating to standards bodies – wanted to spike DEC's guns, knowing how nearly market-ready they were [the developers, that is, not the guns]), said "Woah! Wouldn't it be cool if we...?" At this point the bean-counters at DEC, who'd spent years signing away serious money on R&D (and standards work...

<tangent>
(which involved, among other things, international travel – in the days when 'man-bags' were unusual, it was well-known in the Reading engineering community that a sure-fire means of identifying a standards person was that they always had such a bag, so that they could high-tail it to Heathrow at the drop of a hat)
</tangent>

....) said "No; we go to market with what we've got". So VAX DOCUMENT was born, based on SDML; I used it for a good 15 years, topping and tailing this work with other (sometimes, more or less WYSIWYG...

<tangent>
(but starting with DEC Standard Runoff, which was far from it)
</tangent>

...) writing tools, but always returning to VAX DOCUMENT when there was real heavy-lifting to be done.

Later I was studying for an Open University diploma in software engineering, which introduced me to XML. This is a very flexible system that allows the user to define their own tags and their possible values, which are specified in a Document Type Definition (which explains the abbreviation "DTD" that users of HTML may recognize from the first line of an HTML file...

<tangent>
(that is, a 'well-formed' HTML file, as they insist on saying in the standards world. Many...

<inline-pps>
Correction: all browsers. HTML was conceived as an all-purpose display engine; but in its common use there is usually one DTD (general-puposed online text) which can therefore remain implicit. An explicit DTD is needed only for particular screen shapes and sizes (and, of course, for "well-formedness").

</inline-pps>

...browsers silently assume a suitable DTD even if an HTML file is not well-formed.
</tangent>

.... On one occasion, I was writing to my tutor and jokingly used a pair of these pseudo tags (something like

<apology type="lateness"; explanation="failure of backups">

I'm afraid my assignment will be late because....

</apology>

). I found the device useful and, once you've got it, it makes documents easier to scan – by clarifying the extent  of a long parenthesis and making embedded parentheses easier to make sense of. So ever since then (late 1999 or early 2000) I have taken to using it freely.

        </autobiographical_note>

Update: 2024.05.16.11:15 – Added <INLINE-PPS />