In article <AshleyB-1410961741120...@news.halcyon.com>,
Ashl...@halcyon.com (Ashley Colin Yakeley) writes:
>Without the semantics associated with the DTD, it's meaningless, but so is
>all other markup. But such DTDs always come packaged with a system of
>giving meaning to markup ('semantic system' or 'semantics').
One technical term for this particular version of "semantics" is "semantic
role". Particularly as distinct from "application semantics". The
difference is that the semantic role is what the data represents; the
application semantics is how one expects the data to be processed by
an application (which varies from application to application for the
same DTD; the semantic roles should not).
>Ah, but using the semantics associated with the DTD, the meaning of the
>text really could be 'this is a symphony'. Without semantics, it is of
>course meaningless.
And any good DTD will include a description of the semantic roles of the
various element types, attributes, etc. Otherwise one cannot design
new applications that will process existing data in new ways.
Hope this helps the discussion.
Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!
da...@acm.org
