[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Inheritance in XML
> [James Tauber:] > > | Perhaps you misunderstand what I mean by "behaviour". I am referring > | to how the content will be display and how it will respond to events > | like clicking. > > I am, too. I am saying that at the machine level, behavior (or > appearance) *is* meaning. The meaning of something is the way it > makes the machine behave. That's all there is, there ain't no more. So why not call it behaviour? > But that further level of meaning you're reaching for is meaning for > humans, not meaning for the machine. And right now and for the > forseeable future, that level of meaning can be conveyed only by > natural language. Regardless of how it is expressed, that is what I mean by semantics. > The meaning of "PatientName" to a machine is the > set of behaviors it is supposed to exhibit when presented with > something identified as such. The meaning of "PatientName" to you and > me is something that involves a knowledge of what a patient is and > what a name is, and (more to the point) why and under what > circumstances we should care what happens to the person with that > name, and (even more to the point) what the relationship is between > all these symbols and the actually existent physical object they refer > to. We can say all this in prose, but not in a way that will be > interpretable by machines for a long time. I dont' think whether or not it can be machine representable has anything to do with it. It sounds like you are saying: my word 'semantics' = meaning to a human (place in ontology, etc) my word 'behaviour' = meaning to a machine (appearance, etc) ALL I AM ASKING FOR is a distinction between the two. The word semantics seems the best to apply to the former. Behaviour is my word for the latter simply because style/appearance doesn't adequately cover event handling. I think we agree that a distinction exists. I just happen to think semantics is a perfectly good word for describing the first but not necessarily the second. Reader (to author): what does it mean when something is in blue? Author: it means it's a PatientName. Reader: what is a PatientName? Author: it means something in blue. For those of you who haven't already guessed, I'm a linguist by training. Perhaps I'm trying to project too much of a formal linguistic view on this matter. James -- James Tauber / jtauber@j... Perth, Western Australia XML Pages: http://www.jtauber.com/xml/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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