[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Is HTML structured or unstructured information?
Peter Hunsberger wrote: > On 8/11/05, Philippe Poulard <Philippe.Poulard@s...> wrote: > >>Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: >> >>>... >>>HTML is the example many think they understand. >>>HTML is not just a presentational vocabulary. >>>META tags, for example, are not presentational. >>>FORM tags aren't strictly presentational. Even >>>DIVs aren't strictly presentational. In fact, >>>almost any tag has aspects of presentation and >>>content (note I am not using the term 'semantic' >>>here because presentation is a semantic). The >>>principle 'separation of presentation and content' >>>is flaky in practice. >>>... >> >>hi, Claude >> >>IMHO, presentation is not semantic : semantic is used for terms that >>means something ; you will say that "<b>" and "<i>" means "bold" and >>"italic", but as a meaning of a tag applies on its content, you can't >>say that : >>"my name is <b>Philippe Poulard</b>" has not the same meaning that : >>"my name is Philippe Poulard" ; > > > Sure you can: the code that decides how to display the two will most > likely decide they have different meaning.... Semantics aren't just > for humans any more! > > <snip>conclusions that follow from the assumption that only humans > care about the meaning of tags</snip> ok, let's have more info : instead of <b>, let's use <xhtml:b> (with the right namespace declaration) ; one can decide that <b> is used for naming of a person (why not, even if it is certainly a bad choice), but one can't decide the same for <xhtml:b>, because it really stands for "bold" and nothing else a code that respect standards will no longer decide what <xhtml:b> is for > >>the real question is not about "structured or unstructured" information, >>because by definition markup languages ARE structured, but rather about >>"semantic or not semantic" : XML as well RDBMS may structure both >>semantic and non-semantic information >> > > > Respectfully disagree: structure and semantics are in the eye of the > beholder: tell me is a blob of XML stored in a RDB structured or not? > Does the same blob have any semantic meaning? What if the RDB can > parse the blob into a SOAP descriptor? What if it used a grammar > stored in another blob to do so? > if the semantic structure of a blob in an RDBMS tells that it is XML, then it is structured (whether this structure is easily accessible or not is another story) -what about reading an XML file as binary data ? -what about reading the files where are stored the tables of your RDBMS in a vendor-dependant binary format ? if you ignore the structure, you won't have structured data -- Cordialement, /// (. .) -----ooO--(_)--Ooo----- | Philippe Poulard | -----------------------
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