::scr semantic

[Alaric B. Snell]

On Monday 05 August 2002 12:28, you wrote:

> Vanilla XML implements a "syntactic web".  You can parse a document,
> see a tag like "<title>Lord of the Rings</title>" and "understand" that
> "Lord of the Rings" is the "title".

Not *entirely* - from that you can tell that "Lord of the Rings" is *a* title.

The document might be reading:

My favourite films are <title>....</title>, .....

XML has run into a lot of problems with people thinking "Hmmm, this is *the* 
title of some object". That's led into the mindset that produces XML such as 
"<person><name>Alaric</name></person>", rather than treating markup as it was 
originally defined - to 'mark' a bit of text 'up' with styles, a concept 
which has quite rightly been applied to more than just deciding how to 
present the text fontwise - producing indices of titles and so on for 
automatic cross referencing, et cetera.

> But because this mapping is purely syntactic, you simply know that it's
> identified by the key "title" and you don't know if it relates to the
> title of a book, or the title (honorific) of a person.  They're human
> concepts that have a higher level meaning.

That's closer to the mark, IMHO :-)

> There are many other examples and evangelism about how this is such
> a super cool thing.  The links that Jo posted cover this in great
> detail.

It's a nice idea; it may or may not happen, though :-/

> A

ABS