Re: Very rough draft of TAG finding on self-describing documents

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