- From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) <len.bullard@intergraph.com>
- Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006 09:46:08 -0600
- To: 'Norman Walsh' <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
Sorry Norm, but that reads like skepticism about the streets of a given city at night being unsafe. It makes for a polite and politically correct position in polite and politically correct company, but honest residents will tell you differently and then it comes down to risk management over some n of tests or 'what source do you trust for this iteration'. So far Panglossian assumptions have not worked well for the web. Witness click fraud, splogs, spam and the whole rot of malicious opportunism. The problem of authority and assertions about such on the web is that it does not reckon with two conjoined problems: 1. Criminal and malicious behavior are permanent aspects of the web landscape. 2. The web is an amplifier enabling such behaviors to become instantly and hugely profitable. Therefore, a permanent business will be offsetting the effects of these. Whatever the arch group does that helps with that will be more useful than assumptions that it won't occur or that the significance of it occurring is minimal. It is in fact, a very significant problem. Again, what is this 'self' in the subject? If one has to manage a reputation to obtain and maintain trust, I suspect this will come back to location, time, identity and named verifiable types because the concept 'self' has to be combined with 'aware' and awareness has the distinctions 'what is in my head? what is my head in?' so 'boundary'. What does this statement mean: "nesting things inside each other in arbitrary ways is core to the power of XML." http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/XML and pay attention to 'arbitrary' because I dispute that this is true even if polite and politically correct. Some arbitrary combinations will be nonsense. For that reason, SGML provides notations and DTDs. Now a savvy street user will look for ways to communicate 'correct' interpretations to 'committed' partners. That is all a MIMETYPE does. "...to use with any sort of document, without it having to be foreseen in the schema for the original document" Sounds good. Doesn't work unless the combinatorics are specified apriori. In other words, what TimBL says is not of necessity so, but can be made so by agreement. What one says about a city's safety at night cannot be made so without agreement at scales that cannot be obtained or maintained. So we come to: "This way of specifying n independent schemas, or rather schemas which have back-references to earlier schemas in some cases, allows a product to simply quote the set of XML technologies which it supports. This has to be negotiated between the sender and receiver of XML. It is not the same in the general case to the set of namespaces used in the document, because function elaboration may change that. All the same, the namespaces may be a useful way of indirectly referring to the features." Again: a system is defined in terms of itself. Apparently, DTDs and Notations did work and self-description is a term for saying 'has a schema of some form with everything you need to know to start interpreting this in the opinion of the author'. Does it have to be harder than that? Why? len From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Norman Walsh Indeed. But if we assume that most authors are not malicious and most readers don't carry around pernicious assumptions, I see some appeal in the notion of being able to follow your nose and usually find what the author intended.
Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2006 15:47:40 UTC