• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Roger Costello: My Version of "Why use OWL?"
• From: Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>
• Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 10:14:45 +0100

[Simon St. Laurent]
 >Given the choice of conversations, I'll stick to the strange little world 
of characters and
 >markup rather than striving to build global meaning.

I'd like to see fans of global meaning, Knowledge Technologists etc. take a 
look at
something like MS Word.

1 - If MS Word had a published schema+documentation, would the semantics of
WordML be known? Answer: not even close.

2 - How much of the elaboration of the semantics of WordML is
in MS Word - the application - as opposed to WordML - the schema + 
documentation?

There comes a point - and Walter Perry has been saying it for a long time - 
when the
meaning of a piece of XML exists solely in the imperative logic of a 
particular process
and nowhere else.

Sad, but true. Published schemas are a big help (please can we have 
documentation
for WordML) but they ain't the whole story by any means.

The never-ending quest for perfect import/export filters from word 
processors is an
interesting microcosm of the shared meaning problem. In my opinion, there will
never be perfect import/export filtering without a common rendering model 
and that
seems very, very far away in WP/DTP land.

I really don't understand why MS don't publishing the schema for WordML. As 
I've
said in this post, its not like it will give away the *meaning* of WordML :-)

Sean

http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com

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