- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Sun, 6 May 2007 17:36:13 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
- cc: public-html@w3.org
On Sun, 6 May 2007, Henri Sivonen wrote: >> I have no idea of what you mean by "inferring authority", but why would >> that matter? > > I meant computing the Page Rank. I guessed so, but that's not authority of any kind. >> If someone makes wrong or questionable inferences, is that an excuse for >> making such inferences part of a specification? > > In some cases, inferences may be useful if they are predominantly right and > wrong only a relatively rarely. You haven't explained a) why inferences should be made from existing usage at all b) why the guesses made would be correct even reasonably often c) why the wrong guesses would be rare (and reasonably harmless). > Considering that research shows that "copyright" is one of the most common > class values, it is a reasonable hypothesis that it is used to mark up > copyright notices and that there is demand for markup for copyright notices. No, it's just a guess, and a rather wrong guess. It's also based on a wrong assumption that class names should be interpreted using an English dictionary. Class names are, by definition and in actual practice, just strings conforming to a certain general syntax and selected by document authors or authoring software. It might be a good practice to use mnemonic names, but doesn't mean you would be entitled into reading meaning into them by a dictionary of your choice. Class names are comparable to variable names in programming: they are meant to be internal to the code. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Sunday, 6 May 2007 14:37:45 UTC