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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: patterns vs. identifiers
 8/19/2002 12:10:36 PM, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...> wrote: >I think a strictly pattern-based approach would offer context - both >ancestor and descendant context - as an answer to that, though context >can occasionally be misleading or abused. > That's presumably how humans cope with the problem of distinguishing "tables" from "tables". People know better than to do this, but most could understand a sentence like: "We need to table the discussion of how to format the table for our catalog of tables." No URI's needed! Obviously humans do this with an immense amout of built-in context, but with sensible markup design, it could be possible, (with heuristics rather than logic, admittedly) for a machine to figure out that "table" in the context of a <meeting> refers to the act of postponing, "table" in the context of <html> or another presentation lanugage means a rectangular layout, and "table" in the context of <furniture> means a physical table. Identifiers and logic about them obviously has its place in software and markup, but I take Simon's post as recommending that we pay equal attention to patterns and heuristics. To use my favorite example, real clerks aren't stymied because an order comes in on a form they've never seen before. They look for the patterns they're used to ... and "throw an exception" only if they don't find the information they need. Obviously strong typing "contracts" make lots of sense to improve efficiency in more tightly coupled systems, but not at a cost of losing customers. Anyone who rejected an order because the HTML description section contained a <ul> inside a <p> would soon find themselves unemployed! 
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