- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 17:01:29 +0100
- To: "lisa Seeman" <seeman@netvision.net.il>, "William Loughborough" <love26@gorge.net>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
[Snipping WAI PF since, IMO, language is neither a protocol nor a format :-)] From: "William Loughborough" <love26@gorge.net> > So to "Be prepared for it to be a long process." is a > matter of *forever* because it ain't gonna happen. Whilst I agree with the "who's going to police the police? The coastguard?" sentiment, I think that Lisa is not (just?) hinting towards a controlled language (which, like Orwell's Newspeak, is absurd), but rather/also towards regularized interfaces for creating Web content. Sidenote: whilst this is at a tangent to any useful discussion, there have of course been numerous studies conducted on simplifying languages. A good starting point is the AECMA's "Simplified English":- http://www.userlab.com/Downloads/SE.pdf (PDF only; sorry) also: http://www.aecma.org/Publications/SEnglish/sengbrc.htm which is all well and good, but is aimed towards people who have a relatively high understanding of English in the first place, and can spend the time and effort working on a simplified vocabulary; i.e. applies to a minute fraction of the population. But onto more promising avenues of discussion. I like the DAML (http://www.daml.org/tools/) approach of having content forms, where people can create homepage metadata by searching and/or selecting (Prof. Jim Hendler has talked about this). It was also one of the aims of UWIMP, which is the service that William and I planned many months ago. If we are to create William's much prophecized ambient information space, it must be possible for the people with the information to publish what they know with minimal costs and maximum benefits to them. This is only going to be possible through small incremental changes, although if some organization like Google or Alexa gave over their already vast data stores to the Web community, that would help a lot (why pay for a server when Google and Alexa index it for free anyway?). It's an ongoing battle. Metadata formats such as RDF are there to help too, and a standardized deployment of RDF-in/from-HTML is long overdue (hopefully not another manifestation of the six month phenomenon). RDF is good because the Semantic part of the Semantic Web is there to satisfy the (much ballyhooed) "semantic pragmatic" nature of machines. But marking up text itself to be "unambiguous" is rather HumanMLish in character... the waste of time criticisms are justifiable for corollaries of "the language moves faster than the editor". Not only that, but language is art - if you move towards unambiguity, you may lose the essence of many of the great works. One's mind may drift back to Jefferson's famous "we hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable", and wonder what he thought of Adams' and Franklin's (if their) modifications. -- Kindest Regards, Sean B. Palmer @prefix : <http://purl.org/net/swn#> . :Sean :homepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .
Received on Thursday, 16 May 2002 12:01:41 UTC