::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Simon Kinahan]

> In comparison to natural language, ASCII describes the alphabet, XML
> describes the rules for joining letters into words and words into
> sentences, and the Schema describes the valid kinds of sentences (e.g.
> noun phrase) and associated particular human meaning to them.

Err. No. And you were doing so well, too. Nothing on the other side of teh
sceen *ever* ascribes human meaning to anything else. And XML Schema
certainly don't. All they do is define relationships between parts of
documents, just like DTDs, but much more needlessly complicated and
laborious. Humans ascribe meaning. Some animals might. Nothing else does.

The closest you can get in computer programming to ascribing meaning to data
is to write the code that manipulates it, and even then the computer itself
knows nothing about that meaning.

Simon