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At 8:12 PM +0200 10/23/03, Danny Ayers wrote: >Or am I missing something fudamental here - prithee tell, what exactly is >syntax-based interoperability? What messages can be communicated by syntax >alone? > You are missing something fundamental. We exchange an agreed upon syntax. You send it with your semantics. I receive it with mine. Your semantics are not my semantics. There may be some overlap, but it doesn't have to be a lot. I may not be interested in the same thing you're interested in. For example, you say potato and I say potato, but to a store "potato" may mean inventory unit. To a shopper it may mean "tasty lunch". The store and the shopper do not have to share their internal models of a "potato" in order to do business. The effort to standardize semantics and data models is an effort to require all parties to a transaction to have a single way of looking at the same content. That's doomed to failure. Different parties have different needs and experiences, and thus do not share data models. To the extent their needs and experiences overlap, their data model may be similar in this respects. But they need not be identical. There is no one semantic to rule them all. The real world is much messier than that. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@m... Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002) http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
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