RE: different communities

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 05:11 PM 2/9/01 +0100, you wrote:
>Take this notion of local and global, and map that to my different 
>encoding levels. I claim that data can have several encoding levels. I 
>claim that at any level there is interpretation.

Of course there is intepretation.  I just lack any interest in mapping it 
to _your_ belief in 'data having several encoding levels', as if the data 
is separate from what we do with it.

>Words do not have meaning, people give meaning to words.

>Can we agree on that?

That people give meaning to words, yes.  That this contributes in any way 
to your argument, no.

>Words, tags, characters. These are all just different symbol packages.
>Different interpretation levels.
>
>If we want to communicate we have to restrict interpretation (and thus
>define meaning).

And I'm afraid that's where the breakdown takes place.  You seem to believe 
(from prior messages) that meaning can be fixed in some useful way.  I 
disagree, and I'm not inclined to be convinced.  Nor am I certain that 
general arguments about the nature of meaning are appropriate to xml-dev.

>Apparently in the real world we are able to do this reasonably well. Good
>enough at least to get some things done consistently. The more we restrict
>interpretation, the more precise we can communicate.

But that restriction is performed on a case-by-case basis.  I have very 
different interpretations of the word 'router' when used on XML-Dev and 
when used on a woodworking forum, for instance.

>Now my question to you was/is: at what level do you see a *critical* problem
>for the viability of general markup language?
>Apparently you did spot a problem, and this is very valuable feedback.
>But please identify the problem. What is the problem? Why is it critical?
>Then if we need to solve it, we need to restrict interpretation at some
>encoding level.

No, we need to let people develop their own systems for restricting 
interpretation.  This isn't something 'we' as a general community need to 
do.  I'd suggest that we stop trying to identify and solve problems 
generically.

>There is always a price to pay, I'd like to know if it's worth paying.

Prices to pay, taxes to impose, sometimes worth paying, sometimes not.

If you want to continue this meta-discussion, I'd suggest we take it 
offlist and let the developers get back to work.