- From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
- Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:08:11 -0500
- To: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>
- Cc: "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, "T.V Raman" <raman@google.com>, www-tag@w3.org
Anne van Kesteren scripsit:
> The difference from XSLT for this particular scenario is that XBL
> doesn't actually alter the underlying DOM. The behavior XBL adds is
> also "optional": a document means the same with or without the
> associated XBL being applied.
At the risk of arousing the angry ghosts of Ogden and Richards[*],
I must say that I find this claim about meaning either completely
incomprehensible or false. What sort of "meaning" is it that is
completely unaffected by presentation? Do you mean that XBL cannot
change the *legal meaning* of a document? Not being lawyers or judges,
how can you tell that? If the document is code, does that mean that the
semantics of the code, as interpreted by a human being reading it, is
guaranteed to be unchanged? Or perhaps you mean that the *psychological
effect* of viewing a document in a different presentation does not
count as an effect on meaning? If so, that would be very surprising to
many psychologists, to say nothing of the designers of advertisements.
Or do you claim that it is impossible for a script attached by XBL to
insert a strategic "not" into the presented text of a document?
What on earth are you talking about?
=====
[*] Two experts, to explicate Meaning,
Wrote a text called "The Meaning of Meaning";
The world still perplexed,
Three experts penned next
"The Meaning of 'Meaning of Meaning'".
--
John Cowan cowan@ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan
Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
--Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (rules 1-9 are unknown)
Received on Monday, 29 January 2007 17:08:17 UTC