Re: [unrev-II] TopicMaps, Ted Nelson, Virtual Files, and everything

From: cdent@burningchrome.com
Date: Tue Jun 05 2001 - 11:50:06 PDT

  • Next message: Eugene Eric Kim: "Re: [unrev-II] TopicMaps, Ted Nelson, Virtual Files, and everything"

    On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Eugene Eric Kim wrote:

    > 3. Embedded structure limits the kinds of structure that can be expressed.
    >
    > For brevity's sake, I won't comment on the first two objections here,
    > nor to his general feeling about mark-up, but I do want to say a few words
    > about his third objection. Nelson's solution is to store content as raw
    > text, and structure as a layer over the content. I agree with this in
    > theory, but in reality, there isn't a true separation between the two.
    > Raw text contains just as much embedded structure as an XML file, the only
    > difference being that valid syntax is well-defined for XML documents,
    > whereas it is undefined for raw text.

    I don't think I'm understanding you here. Which embedded structure are
    you saying raw text contains? Do you mean punctuation, paragraph
    breaks, what?

    If I'm understanding zigzag correctly, if you think of a collection of
    text in zigzag, the letters are cells, one dimension creates words,
    another creates sentences, another creates paragraphs, etc. In that
    sense dimensions represent structure and cells represent content. I
    guess ents and enfilades do the same sort of thing.

    I do think that Nelson is on to something when he suggests that
    structure must be a layer above the content. It's very hard, though,
    to express exactly why.

    -- 
    Chris Dent  <cdent@burningchrome.com>  http://www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/
    

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