Re: Associating semantics between languages.

On Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:21:57 +0200, Tina Holmboe <tina@greytower.net>  
wrote:

>  On a different note, I have lately been pondering a hypothetical
>  question:
>
>   Given random XML-based markup languages fooML, and yaxmlbML, as well
>   as random XML-supporting user-agent bar, which language should be used
>   to inform the UA that element X in fooML has the same meaning (same
>   semantics) as element Y in yaxmlbML?

I don't think it is a hypothetical question. Consider, for example, the  
XML vector language that Microsoft implements in some software, and SVG.  
Or Opera's mail message format (yep, if you use M2 for mail what you are  
looking at is XML and CSS - try view source on a mail message), OpenOffice  
format, the XML format that Microsoft Office will use for its documents...

This is a question that is discussed in the XML Accessibility Guidelines  
[0] (which have sadly been left on the shelf by the responsible working  
group, owing to spending two years unchartered and not taking them up  
since) and I think there are two or three interesting partial answers.

The approach that seems most interesting to me as a general solution is to  
follow GRDDL[1]. This is normally a way of extracting RDF from a document.  
But you could use it to "extract" the entire document, and rebuild it in a  
semantically but not syntactically compatible format.

[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/xag#g4_0
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                              chaals@opera.com
          hablo español - je parle français - jeg lærer norsk
   Here's one we prepared earlier:   http://www.opera.com/download

Received on Saturday, 11 June 2005 14:43:24 UTC