On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 02:49:56PM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 12:14:06PM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
The distinction I'm accustomed to seeing made is between "semantics", the meaning of things, and "presentation", the way that meaning is wrapped in a look, to convey it to the user.
Yes, and there's a difference between basing presentation on semantics and creating a semantic class of presentation. In one case, you have presentation classes based on their presentational characteristics, and associate your semantic classes of content with those classes of presentation, and change the associations when you want to modify how a semantic class of content is presented. In the other, you define a semantic class of content as having specific presentational characteristics, which lends itself to the likelihood that you will end up defining three or four semantically-identified classes of presentation that all have roughly the same presentational characteristics, providing greater probability of violation of the DRY principle of design -- which can get messy rather quickly.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're suggesting that the concept that there might be many different tags, for different categories of source material, but which we want all to render in the same fashion, is *bad*.
Well . . . yeah, kinda. At least, I don't see a reason that it would be good, and plenty of opportunity for it to be bad.
I might have accidentally assumed familiarity with a concept that may not be familiar to you: mea culpa. I'll try to fix that now.
DRY = Don't Repeat Yourself
Unnecessary repetition leads to unmaintainability, because when you need to change one thing you often end up having to run around changing it in numerous places, and sometimes people miss things.
I'm not saying we shouldn't distinguish between content semantics. I'm just questioning the decision to tie presentation characteristics directly to semantic classes of content.
If I understood brion correctly, we're not: that will be handled in the CSS.
I suppose I should probably just look at the source code for all this at some point and get a better idea of what's going on behind the scenes.
I'm also curious as to why adatabase query (for example) would care that it's fetching a poem, as opposed to a fondue recipe: I was pretty sure we hadn't developed DBMSes that have aesthetic taste just yet.
I believe the answer to that is "ask the Semantic MediaWiki people", though I'm not sure.
But the point isn't the DBMS.
It's programs people later write to crawl the data, and do statistics on how many poems we have, etc.
Ahhh, that makes more sense. Sorry, I guess I just didn't get what you were trying to say.
That's a good point. Tag properties may not be the best way to handle it. In fact, there's no reason that a simple tag syntax can't be used for semantic markers, and that these cannot be used as cues for applying presentation styles. What concerns me about this is that it seems the way we're implementing a tag syntax for semantic markers is by actually making the semantic markers and presentational style cues synonymous, rather than merely associated (and decoupled).
Ah. No, as I say, if I understood brion correctly, it's a CSS thing.
That doesn't necessarily mean they're "merely associated (and decoupled)", though at least it's not being handled via direct characteristic definitions for XML tags -- which would probably be a Bad Thing for purposes of later maintainability.
To further muddy the waters of the use of the term "semantic": I'm not worried about the syntax of assigning semantic markers and presentational styles. Rather, I'm considering the semantic structure of our markup, and how best it can be planned out for future maintainability. It looks to me like extensions to the semantic structure of the wiki markup are being implemented as features, when such should instead be approached as core functionality. After all, the parser is an implementation detail: the language definition is what makes the parser worth using.
Ok, I'll admit to having completely fallen off the wagon on that last graf. Could you expand?
I'm speaking of the syntax and semantic structure of languages (thinking of programming languages as my usual example, though markup has roughly the same division of design characteristics). Um. I'm basically saying that I don't care too much about the actual appearance of the markup we use, so long as it's vaguely readable and somewhat consistent (and, preferably, doesn't make typing a chore with lots of underscores and tildes) -- instead, what I care about is the rule set for the language, on which that syntax is built. For instance, there's an underlying structure to romance languages (Italian, et cetera) that is different from that of a language like Japanese. One cannot simply swap out words one-for-one in Italian to make Japanese: rather, one must rearrange the structure of the sentence, certain parts of speech exist in one language and not in the other, and so on. The latter is characteristic of differing semantic structure for a language.
I'd like to see a consistent semantic structure that lends itself to a consistent syntax that in turn lends itself to maintainable use.