- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 05:40:42 -0500
- To: Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
- CC: ext Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>, www-tag@w3.org
Patrick Stickler wrote: > And if some application encountered a term grounded in > the Docbook namespace (sans any indication of a particular > version of the Docbook document model) and tried to > find out how to interpret that term by dereferencing > the namespace name URI, (presumably) getting a namespace > document, that namespace document would not be able to > tell the application how to properly interpret that term. > The application might thus be aware of various options, > but ultimately, it would have to guess. It would not have to guess. It would have to decide. That's an important distinction. Guessing implies that there's one right answer. Deciding implies that there are multiple feasible answers, and it's up to the machine (or human) reading the document to choose the one that's most appropriate for its own needs, irrespective of the needs of the intentions of the document author. > The same is true for a human reading the same namespace > document. Humans are smarter than machines, and can decide more easily, and with more context. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
Received on Friday, 18 February 2005 10:40:45 UTC