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"Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@comcast.net> writes:
> Yes, but who is "we"? If I'm American and you are French, we may have
> frequent discrepancies. More to the point, if one or both of us is a
> computer, how will it know how to interpret it? Well, you say, the
> programmer knows. And if we want to have a variety of software agents doing
> the interpretation? How do they know?
Um, because I said at the top of my document that the type system I
was using was ``w3c-standard-french'' and you said you were using the
``ieee-arcane-american'' type system. Both of us have the
appropriate context for each others documents and using that context
we know how to interpret the `date' element. Whether or not we can
or indeed want to interoperate is another problem and mostly depends
on whether we need to. Needing to would probably imply that we use
the same type system.
With my date hat on, why shouldn't I be able to define a UK bank
holiday type wherein I can refer to the forthcoming Whitsun bank
holiday? That's quite a handy type for me to use and, once you've
understood the context of my type, you can use it too! Curiously,
though it probably won't match or be interoperable with the US
national day type. But then, why would I want to interoperate with
it?
Cheers,
Ian
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