- From: Nick Arnett <narnett@verity.com>
- Date: Mon, 31 Oct 1994 08:23:57 -0800
- To: www-html@www0.cern.ch, www-talk@www0.cern.ch
Looking back over the discussions lately, I've noticed that people are starting to use "semantic markup" as though it were a synonym for "structural markup." Let's nip this one in the bud before the masses get a hold of it. SGML and our favorite DTD, HTML, can enable semantic markup, but they don't have to. It's not even clear to me that without combining a database with hypertext, semantic markup is even possible. Let me try and draw the distinction; as usual, clarification is welcome. Structural markup means that you name document elements in the context their relationship with one another, the whole, and other documents. Semantic markup, which is uncommon, associates document elements with lexical relationships. For example, if I make a reference to Microsoft, I might include a semantic tag whose lexical relationship is "is a" and content is "public company." Relationships might also be fuzzy, as in our Topics, rather than explicit. Nick
Received on Monday, 31 October 1994 17:22:41 UTC