[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: [Shannon: information ~ uncertainty] Ramifications to XML
You can't measure entropy as a state function without declaring the properties of the system you are measuring. That is what makes the www-tag debates so onerous: is the www the universe? 1. Is the set of resources equal to the possible states of all resources addressable by URIs? 2. Is the act of naming by URI equal to the operation of addressing by URI? 3. Is there a test(s) by which one and two can be proven true or false? len From: Michael Champion [mailto:michaelc.champion@g...] On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 14:48:24 +0100, Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric@s...> wrote: > Michael Champion wrote: > > > The point of markup is to add redundancy so as to increase the > > probability of information surviving noisy channels or the passage of > > time that tend to degrade shared assumptions about the inherent > > structure of messages. > > Hmmm, I'd agree with the latter, but not the former. Fair enough. I meant "noisy channels" in a somewhat poetic sense to include anything that would degrade the shared assumptions that allow efficient communication to occur. For example, a future world where Microsoft Word 2003 binary documents can't be read by widely deployed software ... the passage of time and the evolution of software would be the "noisy channel." But even in literally noisy channels, such as dear old analog modems, the markup redundancy allowed all sorts of ad-hoc error recovery by software (e.g. tag soup parsers) .
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