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Joe English wrote:
>
> Jonathan Borden wrote:
>
> > Different formats each have their advantages. The clear advantage of
> > explicit tags, is that the meaning is less ambiguous. e.g.
> >
> > <date>
> > <day>02</day>
> > <month>02</month>
> > <year>01</year>
> > </date>
> >
> > vs.
> >
> > "02-02-01"
>
> In the first example, did you mean 1 CE or 2001 CE?
> If the former, under which calendar should the day
> and month be interpreted?
I've not specified, but that isn't needed. The former example is tagged, and
so the "01" may easily be interpreted with respect to the <year> element,
and its associated semantics (for example a schema might tell us, or a
namespace name might reference something like
<div id="year"><p>Years in the Christian calender, to which 2000 is
added</p></div>
>
> Sorry, I really don't see any decrease in ambiguity
> in the first form.
>
Ambiguity is _decreased_ not eliminated because aside from which year we are
talking about we know which lexical value is intended to represent _some
year_ as opposed to _some day_.
If it didn't reduce ambiguity _some_ then there would hardly be a need for
XML, or SGML for that matter.
Jonathan
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