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  • To: "'W. E. Perry'" <wperry@f...>, XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
  • Subject: RE: [permathread:semantics] What Markup Is For
  • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
  • Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 11:14:15 -0500

As simply as I ever heard it put, (Eric Clapton and 
Peter Robinson), on the meaning of meaning:

"It's in the way that you use it.
It comes and it goes."

http://www.eric-clapton.co.uk/ecla/lyrics/its-in-the-way.html

Computer scientists get irked by that.  We 
are steeped in writing instructions.   That is 
the imperialism of programming.   Even a label is 
just a way of coordinating a point of view in time 
and space. 

There are few fixed meanings, but there are ones 
that persist.  We call the latter systems.

len

From: W. E. Perry [mailto:wperry@f...]

At the crucial moment of his argument in a piece called 'On Semantics
and Markup'
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/09/SemanticMarkup Tim
Bray strikes a pose of Socratic agnosis with:  "To oversimplify, XML is
winning and ASN.1 is losing. There are a variety of reasons for this,
but one of them is that it seems to be more important to know what
something is called than what data type it is. This result is not
obvious from first principles, and has to count as something of a
surprise in the big picture."

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