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I have recently returned from the annual American Philological Association
meeting where I said to all who might listen (not many): Eighty years after
Milman Parry we have not begun serious work on an aesthetics of oral
poetry--that is, dealing with oral poetry as what it is, formulae which
exhibit properties of metrics, morphology and vocabulary. Instead we
continue to predicate our aesthetics on comfortable abstractions which might
describe 'poetry', but certainly nothing 'oral'. Despite claiming to embrace
Parry's discovery, philology seems to have backslidden into the comfortable
habits of aesthetics of the 18th and, especially, 19th centuries though
these are abstractions elaborated from entirely different underlying stuff.
Yet aesthetics is an activity; it is procedural; and it is performed in the
case of text against concrete syntax.
In 19 years of practice I have developed a practical aesthetics of certain
commercial and financial documents: bond indentures, insurance policies,
and some other specialized stuff. Using such aesthetics I can arbitrage
bonds against insurance policies, but not in the general case. The aesthetic
activity requires a process--in these examples, it is a parsing--of
particular instances on a particular occasion and from a very particular
point of view in order to establish the equivalence of 'chunks' from
different environments, at least so far as is required to base an arbitrage
upon that equivalence of those chunks in those particular circumstances. The
output of such a parsing is never portable precisely because its nature is
determined by the circumstances in which it is parsed, and portability is
the attempt to move it out of those very circumstances.
When XML came along it was easy to shift the accumulated experience of
aesthetics in financial documents into XML 1.0 syntax and thereby to gain
the considerable advantage of standard XML parsers and other tools. But that
shift was possible at all because XML begins from the premises of the
instance document and the instance parse. XML 1.0's innovation of
well-formedness as opposed to validity emphasized this: that the syntactic
integrity of the document was distinct from, and in XML 1.0's case took
precedence over, validity as conformance to a content model, schematic, or
other a priori abstraction.
To speak of moving an infoset or of determining equivalence in the terms of
infosets is nonsense because these 'infosets' are divorced from any concrete
instance which might be transported or measured. Portable XML, on the other
hand, and the determination of equivalence in concrete instances of XML are
feasible and, indeed, are the functional raison d'etre for an appropriate
aesthetics of XML documents. Arbitrage based on financial documents which
schematically are radically non-congruent is both possible and profitable. I
am convinced that in philology the resolution of all sorts of apparently
anomalous problems awaits only an aesthetics appropriate for oral poetry.
But I am convinced (not least by success in the financial application) that
interoperability--of which arbitrage is an exquisitely refined
form--requires an appropriate aesthetics for the documents which are to be
processed, and any such aesthetics will necessarily be grounded in the
concrete form of those document instances.
Respectfully,
Walter Perry
"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> It seems to circle back to the "If you depart from syntax as the means to
> ensure portability of data, XML makes no promises about its
> interoperability" position. A conservative and sane position, but it
> seems to get in the way of relentless innovation because it comes down to
> "If it hurts, don't do that!"
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