Re: [xml-dev] XML vocabulary for expressing constraints?

[Steve Newcomb <srn@coolheads.com>]

On 12/12/2013 10:32 PM, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-12-12 at 11:58 -0500, Steve Newcomb wrote:
> 
>> In my view, what SGML never had, and XML still doesn't have, is a
>> mechanism for disclosing the semantic intent of a document address.
>> When I mention an address, what am I talking about?  In the absence of a
>> characterization of intent, it's extremely ambiguous.
> 
> +1
> 
> I don't believe that "HTTP Range" cuts it, as putting # on the end of a
> URI is not out-of-band, and still only gives two options (the resource
> itself or the resource as a surrogate).
> 
> At one time I hoped topic maps would give us more of this.

So did I, but I guess it was the wrong time for such an ambitious idea.
As popularized, Topic Maps turned into something completely different --
practically the opposite -- of what I, at least, hoped it would be.

That was then.  This is now.  What's next?  Is the idea *still* too
ambitious?

There is more urgency now than ever before, and for reasons few could
have imagined back then, such as the ongoing substitution of the
behaviors of neural networks, etc., for an explicit social contract.  (See

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy-problem/


).

Charles Goldfarb, among many others, used to worry that, as memory
technologies continued to change (wet clay -> paper -> punch cards ->
...) civilization might lose its memory.  But what if civilization loses
something even more basic, namely the ability to struggle openly with
the problem of understanding itself?  That's a seriously dystopic
possibility.  I think the warning symptoms are visible now.