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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] [permathread:semantics] What Markup Is For
 At the crucial moment of his argument in a piece called 'On Semantics and Markup' http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/09/SemanticMarkup Tim Bray strikes a pose of Socratic agnosis with: "To oversimplify, XML is winning and ASN.1 is losing. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one of them is that it seems to be more important to know what something is called than what data type it is. This result is not obvious from first principles, and has to count as something of a surprise in the big picture." To be candid, there is nothing surprising here if we understand what a label is, and that it is in fact a direct consequence of first principles that labels are the required input to processes which elaborate semantic outcomes, but typing of any sort is not. Quite simply, what datatype something 'is' is a corollary of that something being manipulated as of that type by a process. Type--and not just datatype--as opposed to labelling, inheres in process and not in the text or data submitted to processing. Interoperability, which to the extent that term is properly used to signify the transmission of real semantics, or meaning, is the essence of communication. It is accomplished by noun, or label, overloading. A label used in one way and as of one type by my process and in another way and of another type by yours permits us both to do useful but different things--that is, elaborate different semantics appropriate to each of us--over the same labelled content, text or data. Such labelling is what markup is for. For too long in data processing we have been accustomed to the two-phase commit model of processes sharing an identical data structure. Being forced to share datatypes as well as labels severely curtails the specificity and expertise of what a process might do with given input. Though those restrictions might have been appropriate in the homogenous network behind the enterprise firewall, we cannot now ignore the implications of direct any-to-any node-to-node communication across the internetwork. Type is everywhere inherent in process, not in content, but on the internetwork the specificity, autonomy, locality and terminality (SALT, not ACID) of processes preclude them from sharing local type as a basis for non-local interoperability. Respectfully, Walter Perry 
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