- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:40:27 -0500
- To: Xiaoshu Wang <wangxiao@musc.edu>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
Xiaoshu Wang writes: > I wonder what is the definition of "self" in the self-describing > document? An XML document would not be "self-describing" without the > MIME type being transferred. Thank you for this comment. I will consider it more carefully if the TAG decides to move forward with this finding. I think the short answer is that you are right to point out that one indeed cannot usually infer the intended interpretation of a document (I.e. the standards or specifications that the author was using when creating the document) without some external hints as a bootstrap. If I give you just a bit stream, for example, you may notice that it happens to be the UTF-8 encoding of some well formed XML document, but there's always the change that this is true only accidently. Maybe or maybe not we should rename the finding and or the issue to something like "The Importance of Self-Describing Web Representations". Thank you again for your comment. Noah -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 -------------------------------------- Xiaoshu Wang <wangxiao@musc.edu> 02/26/2007 05:17 PM To: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com cc: www-tag@w3.org Subject: Re: Very rough draft of TAG finding on self-describing documents I wonder what is the definition of "self" in the self-describing document? An XML document would not be "self-describing" without the MIME type being transferred. Also, a resource is defined by having a URI. Then, the interpretation of a resource can certainly be written in a different document under the same URI by way of content negotiation. For instance, the RDF document of URI can be used to offer the interpretation of a binary stream under the same URI. Would this be called self-describing? Xiaoshu
Received on Monday, 26 February 2007 23:40:43 UTC