semantics [was Re: Proposed Design Principles updated]

 

on Tue 4/3/2007 9:44 PM
Karl Dubost wrote

"ah the beautiful word 'semantics'... with a diluted meaning because 
used in many different contexts."

Agreed. My first encounter of the term in WHATWG coincided with the first time I, as a lurker,  thought I understood an ongoing discussion enough to have an opinion about it. I replied, all cheerfully, with a nice linguistically based argument, only to be informed (quite politely) that that was not the sort of semantics they were talking about. I had just sort of assumed that semantics meant the realm of natural language-related inference-support of a type that might allow a search engine to make sense of what we humans write in our web pages. I think, though, that the term "semantics" in the parsing/interpreter/compiling world is more in keeping with what some folks here mean. 

Out of curiosity, does anyone interpret our charge or realm as including that substrate of markup that might connect utterances made in HTML to their meanings in some natural-language-inferential-logical sense? It would be rather fun if it did, but perhaps that will be for our next go-round after this particular HTML-N* has been properly enumerated.

David Dailey

*I rather like HTML5.‾5 as a name -- it would, in some sort of recursive sense, acknowledge the ongoing contributions of WHATWG, but make it clearly distinct from it, hence implying something closer to HTML6 than to HTML5 -- is there, by the way any real way to make an overscore 5 in HTML to imply a repeating decimal?

Received on Wednesday, 4 April 2007 14:56:05 UTC