::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Simon Kinahan]

> On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 10:03:15AM -0000, Simon Kinahan wrote:
> > Err. No. And you were doing so well, too. Nothing on the other
> side of teh
> > sceen *ever* ascribes human meaning to anything else. And XML Schema
> > certainly don't.
>
> XML Schema defines concepts like year, month, timeDuration, etc.,
> that intentionally represent the equivalent human concepts.

Yes, but these are only types: they're just ranges of valid values and an
encoding. I'll grant you that giving something a type *implies* a little bit
of meaning, when a human reads the thing, or writes a tool to process it,
but nothing in XML Schema enforces that where I use year I actually mean a
year, and not some arbitrary value in the appropriate domain.

Its kind of an abstract philosophical point, and I was partly just
nitpicking, but there's too much crap talked about this (not by you, I
hasten to add), to let it pass easily. People have these immense flights of
fantasy about how XML processing tools can work on any XML document, which
never amount to anything, because while all the syntax may be comprehensible
to any tool, it requires some kind of encoding of the meaning - as in actual
code to process the document in the intended way - to make it anything
worthwhile.

This kind of confusion of syntax and semantics is rife in computer science,
leading to fallacies like strong AI. >:-> </troll>

Simon