[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Discovering semantics (Was Re: an unfilled need)
> Precisely! But the number of potential applications is infinite. The > amount of stuff you would need to "discover" is infinite. That > is why inventing declarative syntaxes for discoverable knowledge > such as rendering semantics, interactive behaviour, computation > etc. will always be a sandwich short of the full picnic. And rightly so, since this will enable software vendors to create their own sandwich, keeping the idea market open to innovation and progress. But that still leaves a hell of a lot of beer and potato salad for the standards makers: 1) Associating element types with rendering semantics Everyone agrees on this. We want a default way to view a document in a browser in some readable way. Right now the stylesheet associated with a document is specified in the document instance, but it could just as easily be placed in a central repository and retrieve via query. In addition, there's obviously no reason why several stylesheets couldn't be associated with a single document, au choix. I'm way out of my depth here, but presumably if font-makers can come up with universally understandable, orthogonal attributes like "sans serif", "bold" or "italic", then the same could be done for stylesheets. I'm no expert on aesthetics, but this would be cool even if I just got a list of available stylesheets with a descriptive name for each when I access a document. 2) Associating element types with other semantics ...maybe in the form of Java classes (beans or otherwise). You won't get a fully fledged application, of course, you could at least have a standard method for viewing (which might well be done through some other means than a stylesheet -- imagine a CML document), printing and editing. And there's no reason why arbitrary methods could not be available too. So I receive my "invoice" document and go to the central semantics repository to see what methods are available for it. If I find a method for, say, calculating the total price of the invoice, I don't have to duplicate this code in my application. Objections to putative methods for discovering semantics tend to be based on unrealistic expectations about what this could do. There isn't any need for "Java ontologies" or code that works everywhere in every situation in order to do useful stuff. If I can publish my schema in a central place alongside some code, then I am providing far more for others to reuse than if I publish the data alone. If others can extend my code (through aggregation or -- please! -- inheritance) then there is a real chance that a rich set of reusable syntaxes and associated code will spring up organically for a variety of application domains. So what if I have to go query the repository by hand and then hard-code the link to the appropriate application logic into my document instance? And if someone manages to figure out some basic hierarchical organization for the repository, a la Yahoo, well it would seem petty to bicker about a missing sandwich or two... Matthew 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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