Re: The self-describing web...

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 15:52 -0500, Elliotte Harold wrote:
[...]
> Bottom line: the reader of a document is ultimately responsible for 
> understanding the document. Different readers will understand different 
> things.

In extreme cases, yes; but mostly, they'll understand the same
thing; that's where the web gets its value. It facilitates
shared understanding by providing mechanisms to bind (relatively) small
symbols like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAR_Camp to interesting and
useful meanings.

I can't be certain that the bytes I see when I visit wikipedia's
BAR_Camp page will be exactly the same as the bytes you get; anybody
could edit them in the the mean time. I can't be 100% sure your
browser will render them the same way. I can't be sure your
understanding of English is just like mine. But it's a good bet
that you will understand my meaning if I use that symbol as
a reference, because, by and large, we do share quite a bit
of context: URI syntax, HTTP, TCP, DNS, IP, HTML, and English
(and I think ... yes... in other cases, such as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States , I can use a URI symbol
to cross natural languages too).

If it were really the case that given two readers of a document,
there was no correlation in the information they'd get from it,
the web would be of little value.


>  The document author cannot force the reader to understand any 
> particular thing.

Indeed, but there are some understandings that readers can
hold the author accountable for, and some that they cannot;
those understandings are the ones that the author invokes
by implicit reference to ubiquitous standards or explicit
references to linguistic constructs described elsewhere in the Web.


>  Author's intent does not outweigh the reader's 
> presumption.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Tuesday, 3 January 2006 21:27:37 UTC