[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
At 8:12 PM +0200 10/23/03, Danny Ayers wrote:
>Or am I missing something fudamental here - prithee tell, what exactly is
>syntax-based interoperability? What messages can be communicated by syntax
>alone?
>
You are missing something fundamental. We exchange an agreed upon
syntax. You send it with your semantics. I receive it with mine.
Your semantics are not my semantics. There may be some overlap, but
it doesn't have to be a lot. I may not be interested in the same
thing you're interested in. For example, you say potato and I say
potato, but to a store "potato" may mean inventory unit. To a shopper
it may mean "tasty lunch". The store and the shopper do not have to
share their internal models of a "potato" in order to do business.
The effort to standardize semantics and data models is an effort to
require all parties to a transaction to have a single way of looking
at the same content. That's doomed to failure. Different parties have
different needs and experiences, and thus do not share data models.
To the extent their needs and experiences overlap, their data model
may be similar in this respects. But they need not be identical.
There is no one semantic to rule them all. The real world is much
messier than that.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
|
