- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 10:54:14 -0500
- To: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@apache.org>
- Cc: uri@w3c.org
>>Would it be useful my trying to give an outline of the general >>issues (on this email list), or was your rhetorical point more >>like, please you guys shut up? > >Please don't give a rhetorical outline. I wasn't meaning to offer rhetoric, only a brief technical summary of what was meant by the substitutional interpretation of the quantifiers. But I agree this might not be the appropriate forum. >If you have suggested wording to change, then please suggest it. I believe I have already pointed out wording which I feel needs changing. I cannot suggest a correction because I do not know what the words are intended to convey; that is precisely my point. >If you don't, then this is a redundant discussion It is not redundant. You may feel it is unimportant, but neither you nor anyone else, as far as I know, has answered the questions. >and I have already >answered it before: > >the argument is based on the premise that "identity" is defined more >precisely outside the English language, which is an argument that simply >doesn't apply to a specification written in English. That is not a satisfactory response. I was not making an argument, only asking for clarification; and you have not provided any clarification. The word "identity" in English has many possible meanings, and the text of the document does not specify or even attempt to indicate which of them is intended. Since this is a central definition which has far-reaching technical consequences if misunderstood, it seems reasonable to ask that the document clarify its intended meaning. Your response is spurious in any case, since the vast majority of technical uses of English are conducted with the aid of notations external to normal English (such as computer code and mathematical notations, not to mention specialized technical vocabularies not found in dictionaries) precisely in order to achieve extra precision of meaning. I presume that the specification is meant to be written in technical English rather than being a text that one should read as though it were a novel or a poem, and it is not unreasonable or inappropriate to ask that technical English prose, particularly in a standards specification which is so central to many other efforts, define its terminology with sufficient precision that the intentions of the authors are clear to the reader, even at the cost of some stylistic elegance. Pat Hayes -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32501 (850)291 0667 cell phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes s.pam@ai.uwf.edu for spam
Received on Tuesday, 22 April 2003 11:54:18 UTC