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RE: more on "subelement signicance"

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: Seairth Jacobs <seairth@s...>, xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 16:36:39 -0500

"The usefulness of any given subelement is due to the knowledge of its
namespace, document type, and/or parent element.  Without any of the three,
the subelement does not have a useful meaning."... unless a context of 
some kind can be created or inferred.

Context can be created without these.  Skipping Unicode (a context), 
to XML 1.0, I can know certain things about <x /> without having 
a namespace, DTD, or parent.  It is semantically limited.

If I know that in 80% of the cases in which I encounter

<a href="" 

that it is a hyperlink, I have a probability based 
context (frequency based on past encounters).  
The way to know if it is useful is to know 
the test for utility (what properties must be 
accounted for to identify the pattern as a member 
of a known set or to engage a mediator to find a 
set, or to engage a collaborator to define a set). 

So the definition of useful is narrow.  One can 
always boot out to a process (eg, identification).

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Seairth Jacobs [mailto:seairth@s...]

From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
> It is still *useful* in that it is a well-formed construction
> independent of position in the tree or location in a document
> or namespace.  That is of limited use but real.  It might
> require extra-XML knowledge for example, but spiders that
> troll the net doing indexing might only care about meta tags
> (again, limited but possible).

This makes sense to me.

> So cases exist for which simply knowing <a href="stuff" >
> is useful.  Context is usually important but the
> rule as stated is too narrow.


Okay.  What is missing or how exactly is it too narrow?  Give me your
version of the statement that would satisfy your understanding.

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