[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Douglas Hofstadter's 3-level message model
Let me introduce, for those of you who don't know it or have forgotten the details, Douglas Hofstadter's model of messages as containing three levels: The <DFN>frame message</DFN> says "I am a message, decode me if you can!" The <DFN>outer message</DFN> tells how to decode the inner message; if put into words, the outer message of *this* message would say something like "This message is encoded in ASCII and written in the English language". The <DFN>inner message</DFN> is the actual content intended by the DC:Creator. (:-)) If you do not understand the frame message, you fail to recognize the message as a message; to you, it is just a bunch of chicken tracks, or bits, or whatever. If you do not understand the outer message, you recognize that you have a message, but (like an archaeologist confronted with the Phaistos disk or Easter Island rongo-rongo) have no clue what it says. If you do not understand the inner message, then you have the formal requisites for reading the message, but its meaning escapes you. Note that neither the frame message nor the outer message can be part of the inner message: to one who does not understand the frame message, putting "This is a message" at the top of the inner message is useless; likewise, saying "This message is in English" is only useful to those who already understand English. >From this perspective, metadata is an attempt to make the inner message of one message contain the outer message of another, and if interpreted naively, leads to an infinite regress. Somewhere there must be a core of messages whose understanding is hard-wired into the system, which permit all other messages to be bootstrapped from them. At present, the only way we know to create such universally understood messages is to write messages in some (human or programming) language which can be presumed to be understood everywhere. The fact that no such language(s) exist is the rationale for struggling to create them. And see my .sig for another view of this..... -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@c... You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5) 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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