Re: [xml-dev] The triples datamodel -- was Re: [xml-dev] Semantic Web permathread, iteration n+1

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 8:40 AM +0200 6/8/04, Henrik Martensson wrote:


>As in having people die in munitions accidents, you mean, because that
>is the kind of thing that happens when automated systems mess manuals
>up.

I can see a possibility of this; for instance marking something as a 
CAUTION or a NOTE instead of a WARNING. However, more often than not 
the real problem is not that the user mistyped a tag or invented a 
new tag. It is that they used a valid but wrong tag for the 
information. For instance, they put the warning in a  PARA instead of 
a WARNING.

Even more fundamentally, the real problem here is the necessity of 
the warning in the first place. Most properly designed systems 
(munitions may be an exception) should not be able to kill people. 
There should be nothing in my toaster, computer, or microwave oven 
that can injure me short of dropping it on my head from a high 
building. This should be true regardless of what the manual says.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@metalab.unc.edu
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA