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[apologies if this shows up twice]
On 8/6/02 9:48 AM, "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@allette.com.au> wrote:
> From: "Bob Hutchison" <hutch@xampl.com>
>
>
>> Sorry, but "As many as possible, but no more." isn't helping me.
>
> A frivolous answer, but it had a serious intent: trying to enumerate
> every kind of special case of idiom is a mug's game. A more general
> solution that can handle a good set of typical cases is more appropriate.
> For example, take all the attributes of SVG, DOCBOOK, HTML and
> XSL-FO, and see what can general facility can express them.
I agree that it's a mug's game.
>
>> 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.
>
> People do do this, you know!
Sure. I wonder if schema languages or types or idioms are useful when they
do that? How useful? Useful for what?
>
>> I'm thinking that rendering might relieve some of the pressure on the
>> formatting of marked up text.
>
> Sure, but does this necessitate a single lexical form? Why is it
> harder to provide the mapping from the lexical space to a value
> space, but easy to provide the mapping back (i.e. when rendering)?
Difficulty in remembering what's allowed and what isn't? Difficulty in
choosing between allowed lexical forms? Because allowing all these different
lexical forms requires some complex general mechanism that interprets them?
>
>> 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.
>
> It is not markup that I am saying is idiomatic, but text values. So
> <z size="15 cm" /> for example. Or <position>75°15'00" N 43°05'00"
> W</position>
Yes, I understand that you are saying the text values are idiomatic. I'm
just pointing out that 75°15'00" N isn't the idiom, 75°15'00" N 43°05'00" W
is (maybe). So saying <lat>75°15'00" N</lat> is no more idiomatic than
<lat>75.25</lat>. Moreover, I'm saying that 75°15'00" N 43°05'00" W may be a
fragment of the real idiom which is a way to describe a navigational route,
or a boundary or something else. That using 'idiom' as a justification for
requiring the support of 75°15'00" opens the same justification to be used
for requiring the support of things like invoices in their 'idiomatic' form
whatever that might be (and so why bother with markup in the first place?).
>
>> So when do we stop relying on idiom and switch to markup?
>
> It is a choice made every day by document designers.
> What level of granularity to use. What are their expectations on
> the libraries and parsing that will be available at the receiving end.
Unfortunately this leads to (at least) two things: the requirement of
complex technologies to comprehend the text values; assumptions that data
types correspond to text values.
>
> Cheers
> Rick Jelliffe
>
>
>
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