Critics, with the exception of Oscar Wilde, seem mostly to agree that the death of Little Nell (in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop) is one of the saddest passages in literature. [...] But for me, the most tragic document ever written is “Guidelines for Encoding Bibliographic Citation Information in Dublin Core Metadata”: four and half thousand words of desperate flailing that could have been summarised as “Don’t even bother trying, it just doesn’t work”.
