Re: What does a document mean?

/ Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu> was heard to say:
| At 8:45 PM -0800 3/31/02, Tim Bray wrote:
|>> Finally, are we really sure that a document on the Web is always
|>> bits? and always will be? What about non-binary computers?
|>
|>I'm OK with not trying to build in this much generality. -Tim
|
| That feels a little short-sighted to me. Probably this is good for the
[...]
| generation's  technical Ephemera. Unfortunately not all documents are
| made up of characters (e.g. images) so we need something a little more
| general. I'm not sure what though.

I'm not sure either. There are bits and there are characters. Other
groupings (bytes, octets, etc.) seem even more ephemeral to me than
bits. And like Tim, I'm not too concerned about ignoring non-binary
computers for the moment.

Part of the exercise here is finding boundaries that we can agree on.
While I'll concede that computers may not be forever binary, I hope we
can agree that an architecture that satisfies the requirements of a
collection of networked binary computers would qualify as a success.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM   | It is better to waste one's youth than to do
XML Standards Engineer | nothing with it at all.--Georges Courteline
XML Technology Center  | 
Sun Microsystems, Inc. |

Received on Friday, 19 April 2002 13:29:55 UTC