More nervousness about NS Names bearing semantics

Why do we use XML anyhow?  For me, one of the strongest drivers has been that
generalized markup does not enforce any semantics.  Unlike MS Word or PDF
files, whereas the author of an XML document may have had some intentions
about how it ought to be used, the architecture of XML makes it not only 
possible but straightforward for anyone else to process the document
in new and unforeseen ways without being limited by the author's semantic
horizons.

It was the practical application of this principle to the Oxford English
Dictionary text (572M of highly concentrated information about everything
in the world) that was the life-changing experience that turned me from 
another database geek into a markup-language evangelist.

So while I understand the desirability of linking from a resource to 
all sorts of semantic and definitional information, at a deep level I
don't want to endow too much blessedness and charisma to a schema link
that, at the end of the day, only really conveys one party's ideas about
what a resource's semantics should be.

While we're talking about the Web architecture, the notion that once a
resource is published, anyone is free to apply pretty well any kind of
processing to it without asking anyone's permission seems pretty fundamental
to that architecture.  

Having said all that, giving a vocabulary a *name*, with or without an
accompanying load of non-compulsory semantics, seems to me an 
unmitigatedly and universally good thing.  -Tim

Received on Saturday, 10 June 2000 18:20:35 UTC