Re: Cleaning House

Murray Maloney wrote:
> That is not true. Any publication worth its salt will provide a semantic 
> mapping
> of sorts, either like a legend on a map, or as a set of typographic 
> conventions
> employed in the document. That is, the semantic binding is late, as it 
> were.

Generally this is a specific characteristic of computer related material 
intended for the general public, or application developers.  The most 
that you will find in academic material is in the style  guide for 
contributors at the back of some journals, which is intended for 
writers, not readers.

You also find it where there is heavy use of such codes, like in 
dictionaries.

In most other fields of endeavour, it is just understood as part of the 
general rules of style.  E.g. a newspaper might italicise ship names, 
but it would have a key saying that that was what it was doing.

A lot of the use in computer related materials is to do with the use of 
meta language, because computers generally have some HCI language, in 
some cases formed of letters an numbers, in some cases, like with 
computer based consumer electronics, just function keys.

Received on Sunday, 6 May 2007 09:55:22 UTC