Re: Semantic Layers (Was: Interpretation of RDF reification)

I certainly agree:

 > The first exposure to HTML for most of the "category 3"
 > people of a decade ago was near-traumatic but after a time
 > the principles of "marking up" content was readily handled
 > by millions of people.

At IBM, GML was developed in 1969 and spread throughout the
company.  Every secretary was using GML for word processing.

When I left IBM, it was trivial to map GML to HTML, and I do
all my word processing in HTML.  I use OpenOffice to map HTML
to whatever format anybody wants.  I find the MS Word GUI an
abomination.  (The OpenOffice GUI is no better because they
mimic MS Word.)

I think that the *ML markup languages are excellent tools for
tagging documents.  But the tags are terrible as a syntactic
format for representing general purpose languages and logics.

My recommendation is to adopt the Javascript and PHP approach
of having tags that escape to the appropriate language format.
That method of combining languages with markup has proved to
be extremely successful.

John Sowa

Received on Tuesday, 28 March 2006 14:17:56 UTC