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On 8/6/02 4:06 AM, "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@allette.com.au> wrote:
> From: "Bob Hutchison" <hutch@xampl.com>
>
>> How many idioms do we have to support anyway?
>
> As many as possible, but no more.
I'll try again.
The idiom is 75°15'00" N 43°05'00" W
The idiom is NOT <lat>75°15'00" N</lat><long>43°05'00" W</long>
The idiom is NOT <lat>75.25</lat><long>43.08333333333333</long>
Apparently the former is OK but the later is not.
Why?
Sorry, but "As many as possible, but no more." isn't helping me.
>
>> 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.
I'm thinking that markup can be defined to guide the writing of future
documents. I'm not thinking that you necessarily write a document *then*
mark it up.
>
> 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'm thinking that rendering might relieve some of the pressure on the
formatting of marked up text. Maybe even add a bit of flexibility to allow
more than one idiom to be used. Since idioms are not universal and tend to
be contextual, maybe the document can be used in different contexts more
easily. More, that to use in different contexts you are going to have to
present it differently anyways. And isn't using something in different
contexts similar to inter-operability?
>
>> 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.
Oh, I had nothing so grand in mind. I was simply suggesting that it is *not*
obvious what 'sufficiently idiomatic' means... why one bit of markup is OK
because it is sufficiently idiomatic, and another bit is not OK because it
is not sufficiently idiomatic, while the *neither* is actually idiomatic.
>
>> 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.
So when do we stop relying on idiom and switch to markup?
Who's idiom do we choose? All of them? Surely not.
Cheers,
Bob
>
> Cheers
> Rick Jelliffe
>
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