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History Question: Why does

From: Erik Hennum <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:51:00 -0000

Hi, Bruce: Not the extreme position but the observation about primary use: * Content tends to be a flow with nested annotations (division, block, phrase, term, etc) and tends to be formatted for reading. * A metadata property (like other data) tends to be a data structure over atomic values and tends to enable operations on the content. I agree that the general tendency is only that -- there are many hybrids and gray areas for content and data such as a flow that has a detailed structure embedding atomic values (witness API Reference) or a metadata value that consists of a brief mixed content (witness <publisher>). The distinction would be academic without the fallback to general processing. If the disclaimer specializes a footnote on the body, it will get formatted by default. By contrast, if it specializes <data> in the prolog, it will get ignored silently by default (because there's no known processing for a property with no semantics). Anyway, that's my understanding of the TC's original consensus around the <data> element, which of course may have evolved (toward the fittest). Erik Hennum [email protected] "Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <[email protected]> wrote on 09/04/2009 09:51:10 AM: > > Is your suggestion that metadata is used for processing and content > is used for reading? To put it in more extreme terms, that > processing is the only appropriate use of metadata and reading is > the only appropriate use of content? > > From: Erik Hennum [[email protected]] > > ... maybe there's a distinction between metadata and secondary > flows depending on whether the primary use is processing or reading? > To try to impose some clarity on the gray area between data > structures and documents.