Re: What are Semantics? (Was: Serving generic XML)

At 2:27 PM -0700 8/19/02, Paul Prescod wrote:

>This is an AI-hard problem. Sometimes the heading is the largest text,
>but not always. Sometimes it is at the top, but not always. Sometimes
>the heading starts at the left, but not always. Sometimes the text of
>the document wraps *around* the heading.

I didn't say it was easy, but I do think it's solvable.

>If you think it can be done, do it. You'll make millions on a "Word to
>structured text converter." You'll also prove that the whole "separation
>of presentation from structure" movement was wrong-headed. Why separate
>them explicitly if the computer can do it after the fact? We can ship
>around PDFs and Word documents as "structured text".

I think it can be done. What the market is for it, I don't know. I 
don't think I personally currently have the skills or resources to do 
this, but I've seen things done that are close enough to this 
problem, that I strongly suspect it's possible.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
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Received on Monday, 19 August 2002 18:20:52 UTC