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Re: limits of the generic

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>,xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: limits of the generic
• From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
• Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 18:05:52 -0400
• In-reply-to: <r01050300-1015-C8E93A58D25E11D685CC0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.21]>

At 05:19 PM 9/27/2002 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

>Unfortunately, there are also technologies which attempt to provide
>meaning.  These technologies often define vocabularies which are meant
>to be useful across all situations, but which can only prove effective
>in situations which correspond to the worldviews of their designers.
>W3C XML Schema is a classic case (especially its datatypes), but XLink
>now seems destined to join it as a limited technology whose ambitions
>outran its abilities.

I don't know how you are defining meaning, which makes it difficult for me 
to evaluate what you are saying here.

Is it wrong for HTML to define something called an HREF attribute, and to 
give that attribute semantics that allow link checking to be applied to any 
HTML document? That gives it meaning within one vocabulary, and expected 
behavior among some classes of applications that use this data.

Is it wrong for XML to have ID/IDREF attributes, with associated semantics, 
and allow attributes to be declared to be of this type?

Is it wrong for SQL or Java to have datatypes?

Justify your answer ;->

Jonathan

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