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

Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> 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.

Because syntax is interoperable, useful, and separable from semantics.

> 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.

The consumers get to choose which other consumers they agree with. The 
producers do not get to decide this. That is the crux of the matter.


-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Refactoring HTML Just Published!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321503635/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA

Received on Saturday, 22 November 2008 22:07:48 UTC