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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. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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