Re: One more time: Words have meaning

On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>
> There's more than one user agent. My user agent may well be doing 
> something very different than your user agent is doing.

I am talking about a UA which complies to current W3C, IETF, ECMA and ISO
standards. Not a UA which requires AI technology way beyond our current
abilities.


> You claim, "the class attribute is exactly the same as XML tag names 
> in unknown namespaces -- UAs can have no clue what they mean."

I don't "claim" that -- it is DEFINED that way.


> For a simple example, that's clearly implementable today, imagine a
> user agent that allows the user to select an element such as
> <SINGER>Madonna</SINGER> and request more information on that [...]
> the UA could search for Madonna within the Arts:  Music: Vocal:
> Singers category instead of the entire database.

And how does your UA know that "singer" refers to what we call music, and
not to a device intended to lightly burn hair?


> You could not do this with merely <span>Madonna</span> because the
> span element does not contain as much information as the SINGER
> element.

Surely by your reasoning the UA could look up Madonna in google and work
out that it is a singer.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
"meow"                                          /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 2 September 2002 11:48:05 UTC