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From: "Bob Hutchison" <hutch@xampl.com>
> How many idioms do we have to support anyway?
As many as possible, but no more.
> Is <lat>75.25</lat> so bad if we can render it as 75°15'00" N
I think you are thinking of documents where the data is not given as
part of prose or lists that we need to mark up. The issue of what is
the most efficient or general exchange format for data is largely irrelevant
to those kinds of documents. Instead, the question is how to mark up
the significance of the given text in efficient ways that should be useful down
stream.
So "if we can render it" is not the point. If we already have the data in
that idiomatic format, then rendering it is trivial. It is a data capture
problem not a data rendering issue.
> I think this is an important question that people should attempt to answer,
> and I don't think 'intuitively obvious' will form any part of a good answer.
I am not sure if you are saying they are no idioms or saying that there is
no intuition. If the latter, then (following Raskin's The Humane Interface)
sure, intuition is a bad word and "habit" is a better one. But to say there
are no idioms would be silly.
> While we are at it... What's the difference between what you are calling an
> idiom and certain other people call a data type?
An idiom is the way a person has been habituated to work and think. A data
type is something a computer may find useful.
So idioms are not data types, they are (or should be) use-cases for data types.
Why are numbers in XML Schemas decimal and not binary? Because it would
be unidiomatic.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
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