- From: pat hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 00:57:11 -0500
- To: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
> > Suggestion, though: don't >> say 'denotes'. Instead say something like "indicates", > >How about "identifies"? :-) > >It seems to me like the word "identifies", as used in RFC 2396 and >WebArch often bothers you, and I don't quite understand why. Mostly, I can think of two rather different meanings for it, and I want to know which is intended, and I can't get an answer, which is very frustrating. >Trying to think as a native English speaker (instead of someone who >wastes his afternoons on www-tag), I'd say "X identifies Y" means that >X is a some property uniquely held by Y, or at least held only by Y >among some implied set of objects. ("Her dark hair identifies my >youngest daughter.") That's a very different sense from how >RFC2396/WebArch use the word, though. Let's try a dictionary >(m-w.com): > > (transitive senses) > 1 a : to cause to be or become identical b : to conceive as united > (as in spirit, outlook, or principle) <groups that are identified > with conservation> > [ No, that's not it. ] > > 2 a : to establish the identity of b : to determine the taxonomic > position of (a biological specimen) > [ That's my sense, as in "dark hair" ] Right, that makes intuitive English sense, sure. BUt that just doesn't make sense applied to URIs: they needn't do that. If I just make one up at random, it almost certainly won't do that. > > (intransitive senses) > 1 : to be or become the same > [ Nope ] > > 2 : to practice psychological identification <identify with the > hero of a novel> > [ Nope ] > >So my native-speaker-sense agrees with the dictionary. > >Putting my programmer/TAG-groupie hat back on.... hold on. Ah, okay. >That makes sense: "identifies" as found in RFC2396/WebArch is probably >back-formed from "identifier" as the term is used by programmers. That is my hypothesis, also. >In >programming language grammars, "identifier" is the superclass of >"variable", "constant", and maybe some other things. That is, an >"identifier" is a string of characters which are associated (in some >scope) via the symbol table with some area of memory, a constant >value, a class definition, or something like that. The string of >characters "identifies" the memory location, constant value, etc. > >This is kind of sense 2a above: in the context of the particular >program, the string shows us (via the symbol table) a particular >(identified) program structure. Right, that (extended from a memory location to the entire Web) is one sense. > >Anyway, this makes "identifies" pretty much synonymous with "is a name >for", or "denotes", right? Nooooooo. That's the point, it doesn't. Denotes is the OTHER sense. They are NOT the same, in fact they have almost nothing to do with one another, and I still don't know which one is intended. Pat -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32501 (850)291 0667 cell phayes@ihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2003 01:57:15 UTC