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W. E. Perry scripsit: > In fact, I have designed a system, now in *production*, which happens > to correspond to your example. Ah, good. [details snipped] > So, > in this example, the element which you, as sender, intended to convey > 'counterparty' was, in the salient point of my processing, the very basis > for instantiating 'settlement price', Ah, but this obscures a distinction that is fundamental. It is one thing to *use* the counterparty data to establish the settlement price, and it is quite another thing to *interpret* the counterparty data *as* the settlement price. The one is a matter of authority (who gets to say what the true settlement price was?) and the latter is a matter of denotation (who gets to say that the "foo" element contains a counterparty and the "bar" element contains a settlement price?) > My simple > point is this: my processor is autonomous and may be immune to your > 'intent'. What we share is the syntax of a document. If you really depended only on the *syntax* of the document, then your process would continue to work even if I inserted a man-in-the-middle which unsystematically changed all the element names, attribute names, and order of document elements, since XML *syntax* is quite indifferent to any of these. Left horn: If you can do that just fine, I'd like to hear about it. Right horn: If not, then you are attaching a significance to parts of the document which are not purely syntactic. > If I can--for my > own autonomous purposes--do something useful by processing that document > in a way which you never expected, I am not only free to do so, but > doing so is the perfect expression of my expertise in my own particular > (processing) specialty. I have never doubted that you can act on a document as you please, provided you have shared understanding of the meaning (*not* necessarily the authority) of at least parts of the document. -- John Cowan cowan@c... One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter
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