Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
Matthew Thomas » When semantic coders go bad. [2004-05-11-14:02 -0700 cleanup]  This follow-on about markup and presentation versus semantics consists of a solid demonstration about presentation, the intention for a presentation choice, and how semantics may have nothing to do with the preceding.  Two important catches here: (1) what the actual practices are, and the browser behaviors are, by which people gain the presentations they intend; (2) the silliness of assuming that there is a way to prevent people from carrying any semantics they like in whatever presentation and quasi-semantic markup they contrive to accomplish their purpose.  In other words, there is no way to mechanically enforce precise, unambiguous semantics in a markup practice.

[added 2004-05-11-14:11 -0700] I think there is some sort of information systems law that must apply here.  Try these: There is no way to limit the evocation of higher-level abstractions and interpretations in the use of lower-level formal coding schemes.  The text is material to the message.  The text is not the message. There is no "the message" there.  Syntax has no power over semantics.  There.
posted by Dennis at 5/9/2004 09:34:04 PM