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

["Rushforth, Peter" <Peter.Rushforth@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca>]

> Now here are two exercises for you:
> 
> (1) In your XML document, you want to insert a reference to 
> the Constitution of the United States.  This should be 
> relatively easy, since the Constitution is itself a document, 
> XML itself is a well-disclosed universe of discourse that is 
> packed with symbols that are unequivocally about information, 
> and the Constitution can be found in numerous places on the 
> Web.  Right.  But it turns out not to be easy at all.  
> Remember that the Constitution is emphatically *not* a stream 
> of bytes.  Nor is it any copy of its text, no matter how represented.
> It is a social contract, considered from some perspective 
> that, so far anyway, is known only to you, since you're the 
> one making the reference.

The only thing we can say about the semantics of the identified resource is what we see in the content of the a tag.  The rel/rev attribute value is the machine readable token that programmers understand/rely on, the text is what human consumers are meant to understand.

"A resource is a conceptual mapping to a set of entities, not the entity that corresponds to the mapping at any particular point in time."

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_2_1_1

On the web, there is no attempt to capture the entity that is the social contract you're referring to, only the mapping to something the author of the link considers to be the the appropriate mapping.    The Web allows and encourages this: we're each an authority on reality.

Reality is a bit fluid after all.  Take a wooden box. If you turn it upside down it might be a good stool.  So which is it?


> 
> (2) In your XML document, you want to insert a reference to 
> the Statue of Liberty.  Go.

<a href="http://myserver.org/statue.jpg";>The Statue of Liberty</a>


> 
> Unambiguous non-interactive communication is hard to do.

Yes, but the web makes it easy to convey our point of view.

Regards,
Peter


> 
> 
> 
> On 12/13/2013 03:02 AM, davep wrote:
> > On 13/12/13 03:53, Michael Sokolov wrote:
> >> On 12/12/13 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
> 
> >> HTML has it though: it's the content of the A tag.
> >>
> >> <A href="address">what you can expect to find at the address</A>
> >>
> >> -Mike
> > 
> > I have a sneaking suspicion that Steve didn't equate such a simple 
> > interpretation with it Mike?
> > 
> > "The semantic intent of a document address"?
> 
> 
> 
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