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Jeff Rafter wrote:
> There seems a great similarity-- as the critical school moved away from
> treating poems as works which have a stable meaning-- or answer, if you
> will-- the nature of poetic criticism changed and the readership
> widened. It
> seems in the XML community there are two distinct poles-- XML as
> data with a
> stable meaning (object serialization / schema / infoset items)
> and XML as a
> changing document where the language itself carries semantic value.
A parallel in music can be seen in the "authenticity" movement[1] (e.g.
Christopher Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music) which is after the elusive
goal of conveying the composer's true intentions by re-creating the original
historical setting as faithfully as possible. What this fails to recognize
is that the meaning(s) of a piece are inextricably bound to the instance as
performed in a particular context by a particular artist (not merely a
"technician"). And that this fact should be celebrated, not decried (or
denied)!
Interestingly enough, a pipeline approach to XML processing[2] seems
particularly compatible with the acceptance of the dynamic nature of meaning
and its multiple contributors. Contrast this with a monolithic system that
declares once and for all the way things should be interpreted from
beginning to end[3]. (Stravinsky being one of my favorite composers, I've
always been baffled by his tyrannical stance on interpretations of his own
music.)
Evan Lenz
[1] http://homepages.kdsi.net/~sherman/encyclopedia.html
[2] http://xpipe.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/XML_MetaArchitecture.html
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