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On Tue, 2010-01-05 at 09:38 +0000, Michael Kay wrote: > > > > I claim that there is no intrinsic meaning in an XML > > document, but rather that external knowledge is applied to > > infer meaning. > > I agree. > > > > This is very different from RDF, where explicit URIs are > > used, > > I disagree. The URI http://www.ibm.com/plans-for-new-supercomputer.xml > has no more intrinsic meaning than the tag <i>. We have to be careful not to get too mired down with semiotics...what do we mean by meaning... for sure there's a sense in which no string has any "intrinsic" meaning, it's just a sequence of characters... The URI is an unambiguous identifier, and I'm not really sure I'd want to try to go too much further... I don't share the idea for example that anyone can assign an authoritative URI to represent a person, a dog, a snowflake, or any other real-life object. I think you're right that a URI doesn't have any more meaning than any other string, a priori, but we can look at it and, knowing it to be a URI, get an unambiguous name. Of course, there are lots of other ways of getting unambiguous names, I'm not trying to promote one, but was actually trying (badly) to say that I think the ambiguity that XML names afford is not a bad thing. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
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