RE: A Single Foundational Logic for the Semantic Web

> From: Sandro Hawke [mailto:sandro@w3.org] 
> > No, I think that is an exact mirror of the human condition, and
> > inevitable in global forum. People talk different languages, but 
> > manage to get by using patchy translations.
> 
> Well, no.  Actually, pretty much everybody on the web speaks 
> the same IP, TCP, HTTP, and HTML.  It's amazing.

Sandro, have you tried writing HTML that does anything more than basic stuff
*and* displays properly on lynx, Opera, Netscape 4, Mozilla, IE4 and IE6?
If you had, I think you'd agree that HTML has at least dialects, if not
creoles with other languages.  And even an old, small and well-debugged
standard like TCP has dialects, notably the Windows NT 4.0 dialect which is
probably closer to Glaswegian than to any more internationally known
language...

Different people seem to want different cores for the semantic web before
the languages spread out to form distinct dialects.  We have the advantage
of being in on this relatively early in the process, and we may (*may*) be
able to hold it together more effectively than in the early days of HTML
development so that the dialects are at least closer together.  Certainly
I'd much rather see Sandro's 'amazing' Web, given the choice, than one that
uses patchy translations with all the loss of nuances of information that
implies.

		- Peter
--
Peter Crowther, Chief Architect, Network Inference Limited

Received on Tuesday, 30 April 2002 13:28:21 UTC