[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: different communities
At 05:11 PM 2/9/01 +0100, you wrote: >Take this notion of local and global, and map that to my different >encoding levels. I claim that data can have several encoding levels. I >claim that at any level there is interpretation. Of course there is intepretation. I just lack any interest in mapping it to _your_ belief in 'data having several encoding levels', as if the data is separate from what we do with it. >Words do not have meaning, people give meaning to words. >Can we agree on that? That people give meaning to words, yes. That this contributes in any way to your argument, no. >Words, tags, characters. These are all just different symbol packages. >Different interpretation levels. > >If we want to communicate we have to restrict interpretation (and thus >define meaning). And I'm afraid that's where the breakdown takes place. You seem to believe (from prior messages) that meaning can be fixed in some useful way. I disagree, and I'm not inclined to be convinced. Nor am I certain that general arguments about the nature of meaning are appropriate to xml-dev. >Apparently in the real world we are able to do this reasonably well. Good >enough at least to get some things done consistently. The more we restrict >interpretation, the more precise we can communicate. But that restriction is performed on a case-by-case basis. I have very different interpretations of the word 'router' when used on XML-Dev and when used on a woodworking forum, for instance. >Now my question to you was/is: at what level do you see a *critical* problem >for the viability of general markup language? >Apparently you did spot a problem, and this is very valuable feedback. >But please identify the problem. What is the problem? Why is it critical? >Then if we need to solve it, we need to restrict interpretation at some >encoding level. No, we need to let people develop their own systems for restricting interpretation. This isn't something 'we' as a general community need to do. I'd suggest that we stop trying to identify and solve problems generically. >There is always a price to pay, I'd like to know if it's worth paying. Prices to pay, taxes to impose, sometimes worth paying, sometimes not. If you want to continue this meta-discussion, I'd suggest we take it offlist and let the developers get back to work.
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