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Hi Roger I love your choices of topics and you unstoppable, determined effort to get to the bottom of things regarding XML. I would posit that XML is a system for making 'affordances'.
Affordances can take many forms, many of which relate to uses of symbols facilitated by the writing system and, more recently in history, the printing system. So I would posit that
XML, like its predecessors writing and printing, is a system for creating affordances. By 'affordances' we mean devices we humans love to use to get something done like opening a door or celebrating a
wedding. For the former a typical affordance is a door knob or door handle. We know what one is for just by looking at it, and with minimal learning, perhaps from observing others. For the latter we have, for example, the affordance of a
wedding card. A most basic affordance is an extended hand with the intention it be followed by a hand shake and perhaps friendship or agreement of some mutually understood kind. In all cases the affordance has the concept of mutually shared understanding and at a fairly simple level so as to have potential for wider adoption than the immediate users. With a wedding card, in the UK it is a card folded in two with the opening on the right and a greeting usually printed and generic on the front and space inside for individual hand-written
greetings and / or names. It is easy to understand where to add your name and might be passed around for other names. Etcetera. I posit that XML is similar to the system of artefacts and
conventions which allows the production of a greetings card: Similar, or even more so, parallel to the writing and printing systems, by design, I think, so that it allows the replacement
of written and printed affordances, and, moreover, it allows the capturing of most or all essential features of a written and / or printed affordance. How this relates to your idea is that I think an affordance
doesn't really linearise a human thought so much as the affordance is transferred into the human mind as a set of mechanisms which the human can combine with their thoughts in such a way that they can be transferred to the
affordance within some set of tolerances shared by others. Then the affordance can facilitate its intended outcome within a similar set of tolerances; and all this with the hope of the proper outcome being achieved due to the common
understanding of general thought processes. Affordances share qualities such as significance (they have a feature which signifies their purpose clearly), some follow-on action, and facilitation of the purpose they
signifiy. XML markup has the potential for each of these. It has semantics which signifies its purpose, usually embodied in its syntax, the existence of its instances usually has a clear follow-on action or set of actions to
be performed and in these actions it usually facilitates the final outcome which is its purpose. ---- Stephen D Green
On 1 July 2014 10:38, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
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