[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Begging the Question
Since David Megginson has introduce the quite valid analogy between our fundamental specifications and constitutional law, I will extend it a bit in the hope of casting more light than heat. As general practice, the federal courts (and ultimately the Supreme Court) build upon earlier interpretations when deciding constitutional questions. They are not, however, obliged to do so, and the adaptability of the Constitution is based upon this fundamental mechanism of extensibility: the court may always return to the literal syntax of the Constitution and, in the context of the case at hand, elaborate an entirely different semantic outcome than achieved by the body of previous decisions on the same constitutional questions. All of the great inflection points in the history of U.S. law rest on such reinterpretations. As I return once again to insist: a node in a Semantic Web *may* rely upon previously-agreed semantics when processing a new question, but 1) that process is 'legally' constrained only by the syntactic rules of the fundamental specification itself; and 2) the business of elaborating the particular semantics of an instance is the proper role of the processing node alone; and 3) the salient semantic constraints on the outcome of that process are those expressed, through that process, by the specific data or environmental circumstances of the instance, just as the constitutional nexus in a judicial interpretation must be solidly grounded in the facts of the specific case at hand. Respectfully, Walter Perry David Megginson wrote: > The U.S. president is head of state because the U.S. constitution > says so. > > In each case, while they're often ambiguous, self-contradictory, and > underspecified, the XML Namespaces spec and the U.S. Constitution are > normative documents, not simply unproven assumptions. That doesn't > establish that the it is natural or morally right that the > U.S. president be (or not be) head of state, but it does correctly > state that the president's position conforms to the specification that > defines the United States in the first place.
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