[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: simple question on namespaces.
On Fri, 29 Dec 2000, Tim Bray wrote: > At 09:41 PM 28/12/00 -0500, Arjun Ray wrote: > >On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, Tim Bray wrote: >> In a public environment like the Net, where the point is to >> agree on and share definitions, a "controlled vocabulary" without >> a means to verify formal validity is magnificently useless. > Now that's just silly. There is no machine-processable definition > of the semantics of HTML or SVG or PostScript or PDF or JPG or > GIF "Controlled vocabulary" != "semantics" (Just like "declaration subset" != "document type definition" :-)) Whether a "word" is in a "vocabulary" does not need a semantic explication to be decidable, or does it? (Even if it does, I quesion whether this is true for all domains, i.e. a necessary generalized view of the problem.) I've already quoted the examples involving ForgleBurp/Farglebarp et al, but let me repeat one passage: : Either the NS URI must *always* points a formal definition of the : vocabulary (not schema) of the name space so that you (and your ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ : processors) can reliably examine that definition to validate that : names you've encountered are really in the vocabulary > or - you name it - but knowledge of how to deal with these data > formats is self-evidently shared; Indeed. A lot of the time we don't inquire into the exact details of how the knowledge came to be shared; rather we proceed from the fact that the knowledge *is* shared. That is, it's a no-go without the sharing. > hence the requirement for MIME technology to identify them. MIME types are much like notation declarations actually (and the usual association of system-ids for notations with processors thends to strengthen the likeness.) > A similar need exists for chunks of XML, well in advance of us > having technology to share definitions beyond the syntactic level. Well, this is the type assetion problem that Eliot Kimber, among others, have been ranting about for years. http://www.syntext.com/topics/sgml/kimber1.html (More and more I'm convinced that the first three paragraphs of the XML-Names spec harbor a whopping non-sequitur, never mind that there was never a point to the first example in A.1 that I could ever divine.) Arjun
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