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John Cowan wrote:
> "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" scripsit:
>
> > That would tend to suggest that for the XML on The
> > Web system, the Infoset specification is core and
> > that XML 1.0 is a syntax mapping corresponding to
> > a subset of SGML.
>
> Why do people have to take this superior-inferior, I-win-you-lose point
> of view? Why can't the syntax and the infoset just be two ways of
> looking at the blackbird? Light is the left hand of darkness, darkness
> the right hand of light.
Because we cannot serve two masters, and only one of these premises can be
the single true foundation. I know that you believe that the Infoset
(capitalized--the spec) is innocent of semantics, but it is not, anymore
than is Plato's Cave. A very long epistemological journey begins from one
or the other, but not both, of these postulates. I came to XML because it
appeared to begin by 're-valuing the lexical', in Simon's admirable
phrase, and because I had seen how the oldest, the original, field of
Western scholarship had been forced to begin again from first principles
and had found its new foundation it the hard reality of syntax. We cannot
grant primacy to both light and darkness because one must have the
superior position to correct the other. In the lexical case, in philology,
by the late nineteenth century the scholars of the abstraction-superior
persuasion routinely discovered errors in the text. In the hands of
someone perceptive enough to ask the truly fundamental question, those
very errors provided the evidence to overturn the soaring Babel towers of
scholarly criticism and aesthetics.
Respectfully,
Walter Perry
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