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By restricting the definition of data, you can
well be right, but I believe that only by
restricting it to internal representations
output in a given form. Making data portable
is not the same as making software interoperable.
Markup is a bridge for that and it is reliable
as the contracts; no more. The first contract
is syntactical, aka, XML. After that, things
get fuzzier and inevitably, reliability goes
down. Most of everything done after XML 1.0
are attempts to push it back up. Mileage varies.
Otherwise, we are haggling formal definitions
for a generalization.
len
From: W. E. Perry [mailto:wperry@fiduciary.com]
"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> Data is portable. Software interoperates.
May I respectfully disagree. It is because all of us with sufficient experience have learned that data 'intended' for one application does not interoperate in another that we have turned to markup. IMHO a marked-up document is not data; it is perhaps best imagined as
the precursor to data. A particular process operating upon a marked-up document on a particular occasion will produce the semantically rich output which we may regard as data. That data is not portable; it is instantiated in a particular form for the particular
expectations of particular processes, which are themselves embodied as software.
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