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I can't wait to see the XML.COM condensed version of this thread. :-) Is it there? We can split some fine hairs here, but often meaning has to be discovered from clues found elsewhere and then projected onto the text. Worse, the translations into an understanding readily shared can vary enormously such that any such original meaning is distorted or not provable as original until some acceptable number of texts are translated. There are linear markings from the Mystery Hill site (American Stonehenge) which some claim are Phoenician but are hotly contested otherwise. Before accepted, both the decipherers and the archaeologists have to find mutually reinforcing but quite separate evidence (previous examples of the text types and artifacts attributable to some past civilization). It may not be random but be meaningless: see the problems of assuming some astronomical signals were meaningful because they were regular (rotating and emitting). Non-randomness isn't meaningful per se. One can assume that a wedge-shaped tablet found in a collection of such is if other evidence indicates the site is a library, then start building up example sets until the key is discovered or a dictionary is created that self-consistent to a tolerable degree. Otherwise, a Rosetta Stone is required. So it isn't that cut and dry. As I said in my reply to Mike, you can be looking for math only to discover belatedly, possibly by accident, that they were just saying Hi: Cheops Slept Here. Once you know about star alignments, some aspects of pyramid layouts make sense. Unfortunately, so does Stonehenge, Mystery Hill and a myriad of other sites - but it can't be proved and may not be true in each or every case. "Documents written in natural languages have meaning even if you don't speak those languages. They do carry information." That is so but until you learn them or someone who has tells you, you don't know what they mean. We are quite close to the "if the tree falls in the forest.." argument. The best I can do is say, yes it has meaning to someone and yes, strictly speaking, by establishing the non-randomness is purposeful, not a side effect of another regular process, we can agree there is information there. Shannon built modern communications by saying reproducibility, not semantics, are the key to designing communication systems. That said, we of course agree about the value of tagging regardless of whether we have the descriptions. XML is self-describing to the extent one understands the Rosetta Stone that is the XML 1.0 specification, then acquires by some evidence, a workable set of descriptions for the tag names. Doctor Goldfarb often points to glossing as the original modern form of hypertext and markup. All other things being equal, given some XML instance, I sure do prefer a well-documented schema or DTD to reading someone else's code to discover what I am supposed to expect and what to do about it. Or just Hide The XML and give me the stinkin' compiled application to install. len -----Original Message----- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...] At 12:17 PM -0600 1/15/02, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: >A label is not a name unless it is meaningful. >Natural language is not self-describing unless >you were taught it. I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by "self-describing". I think a book about the English language written in English is self-describing in and of itself, whether anybody speaks English or not. However, leaving that aside there's a deeper assumption I want to cut off before it becomes too embedded in the debate. Documents written in natural languages have meaning even if you don't speak those languages. They do carry information. They are not random strings of characters. I've been reading a lot about the theory and history of cryptography lately, and it's amazing just how much information you can pull out of ciphered text, because, in fact it isn't random. It's harder to read ciphered text than unciphered text, but it's not impossible. And that's a world of difference. Reading text in a language you don't speak, but which has not been deliberately encrypted, is a similar problem; and in fact some of the same techniques were applied to languages like Linear B and hieroglyphics that are used to break ciphers. When a document is marked up, the information of the markup is there, whether we recognize it or not. It is a property of the text itself, not a property of our perception of the text. With appropriate work, experience, intelligence, and luck that markup can be understood. Can unmarked up text be understood as well? Yes, certainly; but markup adds to the information content of the text. It makes it easier to decipher its meaning in a very practically useful way. This is a question of degree, and text+markup is easier to understand than text alone. Langauge is certainly important, but it is orthogonal issue. Given the choice of data marked up in Ugaritic vs. the same data marked up in English, I pick English. But given the choice of data marked up in Ugaritic vs. the same data not marked up at all, I pick the data marked up in Ugaritic.
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