- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 20:08:12 -0400
- To: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Cc: "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, www-tag@w3.org
Dan Connolly wrote: > On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 19:01 -0400, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote: > > Dan Connolly writes: > > > > > I'd be happy to go with the conventions. I find the wikipedia > > > article pretty nice to start from > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic > > > > Gee, I'm really torn about that. On the one hand, as one > who's not expert > > in those areas, I'm very excited to discover that these > formalisms have > > been so carefully developed. Not reinventing the wheel seemslike the > > right approach. > > > > Having said that, David Orchard was on the call making the > case that even > > my relatively simple efforts to present set theoretic approaches > > separately from programmatic descriptions like XML Schema > were a step away > > from the sort of approachable commonsense explanations that > our readers > > will be looking for. Honestly, I find that wikipedia article > tough going, > > yes... it took me about 18 months, somewhere between 1998 and 2003, to > get it. That's a relief. I'm feeling less stupid already! > On the other hand, 18 months is not all that long compared to the > lifetime of the TAG versioning issue Agreed. My concern is that, compared to the time most readers want to spend with a TAG finding, it's a bit on the long side. Seriously, I'd love to find a way to use whichever existing formalisms as the underpinning for something good, but only if we can manage to explain it in commonsense terms that would be of value to the typical finding reader who's looking for straightforward (if deeply reasonsed) advice on versioning their Web languages. Early returns suggest that I may have as much as 17.5 months to go before I'm competent to have an intuition as to whether that's practical using these formalisms. Still, an interesting challenge. -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Saturday, 9 September 2006 00:08:29 UTC