Re: Datatyping literals: question and test cases

pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu> writes:

<snip/>

> >No, but it's a matter of authority. If the "owner" of the datatype
> >(the agency that has the authority to define it) says there is no
> >ordering for the members of its value space, then it doesn't have
> >an ordering.
> 
> I can't make sense of this. It sounds to me like saying that because
> Im not interested in the colors of the bindings of my books, that
> therefore they have no colors. Look, I can take one of these unordered
> value spaces and *I* can define an ordering on it. Of course it *has*
> an ordering. In fact, if its finite with cardinality N, it has
> N-factorial orderings. Authority is fine, but its unwise to claim
> authority over Platonic abstractions.

Further to my other postings, _all_ it means in practice for W3C XML
Schema to say that e.g. the anyURI simple type is unordered is that
you can't use the max/min facets to constrain subtypes thereof.
Applications are free to define operations which depend on an ordering
which they also define.

As you say, strings are a good example -- most people agree they're
ordered, few can agree on what the order actually _is_.

ht
-- 
  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
          W3C Fellow 1999--2002, part-time member of W3C Team
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Received on Monday, 4 November 2002 05:57:51 UTC