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1/25/2002 4:46:15 PM, Mark Baker <distobj@a...> wrote: >It only seems fuzzy because the principles behind it aren't well >understood. In actuality, it's anything but; it's the most powerful >distributed software infrastructure that's ever been built. I meant "fuzzy" in the fairly rigorous sense of fuzzy logic/set theory, see http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/computers/computers8.html Definitely not in the perjorative sense of something that isn't powerful. From the SciAm page: "Fuzzy logic is a generalization of standard logic, in which a concept can possess a degree of truth anywhere between 0.0 and 1.0. Standard logic applies only to concepts that are completely true (having degree of truth 1.0) or completely false (having degree of truth 0.0). Fuzzy logic is supposed to be used for reasoning about inherently vague concepts, such as 'tallness.'" My point is simply that many things we discuss here such as "what the XML spec says" [c.f the discussion of what non-validating parsers are supposed to do with DTD information or the lack thereof], what "The Web" is, what the relationship between Push/Pull and event/tree processing models are, are "inherently vague concepts." Maybe the XML spec could be formalized to the point where it is no longer intrinsically vague, but I doubt if we'll ever fully agree on the other stuff. I find "fuzziness" in this sense a very useful organizing concept: rather than debate what "The Web really is," propose criteria to define the "Webness" of a technology. HTTP, HTML, and URIs probably have a 1.0 "degree of membership" in the fuzzy set "The Web" whereas UDP, FTP, PDF, etc. have a somewhat lower membership. The "Webness" of XML is an interesting question .... There are products (mostly designed in Japan) that take the "degree of truth" numbers and the math very seriously here and do powerful things; I would not even attempt to argue that we should do so here, I just find in a useful heuristic device for thinking about nasty "is X a Y" problems. For example, in some sense it doesn't matter what the intent of the XML spec says: if all processors implement some XML feature in the same way, it is really and truly part of "XML." If there is agreement in principle, but non-interoperability in practice, it has a high, but not complete degree of membership in "XML." If the people here scratch their heads and can't agree on what the spec implies, and the processors do different things, it has a low but non-zero degree of membership in "XML." So, a practical person might use this heuristic and say "Hmmm, that feature has a non-unity degree of membership in XML, I think I'll stay away from it" rather than "Hmmm, the consensus of the gurus on xml-dev is that that feature is really and truly part of XML, so I'll use it."
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