Re: "world needs less vocabularies"

On Mon, 2022-11-28 at 14:35 -0500, james.schoening@ieee.org wrote:
> Alan, 
> 
>  
> 
> I agree an uber-ontology could not succeed, because it would grow far
> too large.

This is how SGML came to be - the predecessor, GML, came from a US
government attempt to define a single formatting and typesetting
language for all possible needs, and it ended up impossible.

So they had to support domain-specific markup (and hence ontologies),
which is what we inherited in XML of course.

The difficulty in mapping between them led first to ISO DSSSL, which
has a transformation step and a formatting step. You would first
transform your SGML into the format that you knew how to format with
the second step.

This became XSLT (transformations) and XSL-FO (formatting), both of
course widely used today. XSLT in particular is a domain-specific
functional (declarative) language for mapping between tree-structured
information sets.  XSLT is harder to use than not mapping (obviously),
but a lot easier in many cases (and more performant) than using
procedural approaches.

liam



-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org

Received on Monday, 28 November 2022 22:52:31 UTC