Re: Comments on HTML WG face to face meetings in France Oct 08

Elliotte Harold wrote:
>> The document producer has the right (and in fact, the responsibility) 
>> to uniquely specify what their document means.  What the consumer does 
>> with that is up to the consumer.
> 
> Clearly we simply disagree on this. I do not believe there is some 
> inherent meaning in the document that exists independently of its text.

Then why are we bothering with markup specs at all?  Let's just have 
everyone put out their text as natural language, and go home.

Or am I missing something in your argument?

>> Given document producers that shirk said responsibility (most of 
>> them), it falls to consumers to have a way to uniquely determine 
>> meaning given the input.  
> 
> It always falls to consumers to do this.

And we would like consumers to have a way to do this in ways that agree 
with certain other consumers, so as to prevent misunderstandings.  This 
is why we have specifications at all.

-Boris

Received on Friday, 21 November 2008 15:55:23 UTC