- From: Sjoerd Visscher <sjoerd@w3future.com>
- Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 00:22:05 +0200
- To: www-html@w3.org
Junk Account wrote: > As far as "structure" goes, this means simply an enumeration of the > parts, in such a way as to form e hierarchy. It does not say anything > about what each of those parts might actually mean. > It does not say if it is a paragraph, a piece of code, a lyric, the > abstract of a scientific paper, a movie, a picture, or whatever else. > It is simply a hierarchy. A tree. > "What each part means" is the semantics. I've always considered titles, paragraphs, tables and lists to be structure. They give the content no meaning. Structure *is* semantics, but only up to a certain level. Structure is all the meaning which is usefull without actually knowing what the text means. F.e. I can create a ToC of a properly structured Japanese document, without knowing any Japanese. > The per-capita income of Kenya for 1988 is probably there, somewhere in the net. > Can you get it in just one search? Actually, almost. I first tried "The per-capita income of Kenya for 1988", but that got me only documents with recent information, so I added "history". The third page of that query tells me that it is 370 current US Dollars. > Even if you got more or less decent results....could you (or even a > search engine, programatically) extract just that microcontent? Or > would I need to load and read whole pages looking for the relevant two > lines in each? Apparently Google can, again almost. If your search for "The per-capita income of Kenya", Google responds with "Kenya — GDP - Per Capita: $ 1,100". > If microcontent is not programatically extractable, furthermore, then > I'd have to do some screen scrapping to be able to reuse that content. Which is probably what Google does. They are doing something special with the CIA World Factbook. > Shouldn't we be providing ways to hook extensible meaning at all > levels (including the elemental one), in order to facilitate such a > thing? > > Are we providing extensible means to mark up microcontent semantically? > > To add semantic functionality to the web probably requires whole > lenguages, with concepts as "is-part-of", inheritance, and even more > complex relationships. And being such a vast thing, likely requires > extensbility inherently. > If you ask me, I'd separate. In advance. I think XHTML 2.0 already does a very good job, with the Metainformation and Role Modules. It just needs to take the extra step, and remove the old semantics-only elements (address, code, quote, kdb, etc) -- Sjoerd Visscher http://w3future.com/weblog/
Received on Thursday, 25 August 2005 22:22:22 UTC