- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:15:36 -0400
- To: robin.berjon@expway.fr
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
At 10:28 AM +0200 8/20/02, Robin Berjon wrote: >The part I fail to understand is "even without agreement". How is >that going to make more sense than a vocabulary that has agreed upon >semantics such as MathML? Are we talking about a musician or about a >sewing machine model? > It will make more sense than MathML because we are not talking about math, and MathML does not have the vocabulary to describe what we are talking about (pop celebrities in this example). No single vocabulary will describe everything we wish to discuss. Even a natural vocabulary such as English or Japanese needs to add new words from time to time to describe new things that did not previously exist (computer, fax, airplane, television, etc.) Yes, if you wish to discuss MathML, then by all means use MathML. It's a nice spec that covers its limited domain of equations well. But often we wish to discuss things that are not covered by existing predefined vocabularies. I am sending you this message. We have no prior agreement, yet you likely will understand at least some of its content. You may not have exactly the same understanding of it as I do, but in all likelihood there will be some overlap. There is intrinsic, if fuzzy, meaning in the message itself. To some extent that meaning depends on context. One context is that we both speak English. If you responded to me in French, the meaning would still be there. I could still follow most of what you said, though some of the meaning would get garbled between the e-mail and my brain. If you responded in Chinese, the meaning would still be there, though I personally could not extract it without a translator or several years spent studying Chinese. But the meaning is still in the message itself, irrespective of whether I, personally, can usefully extract it. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Received on Tuesday, 20 August 2002 09:30:27 UTC