[SCL] late as expected

Murray Altheim m.altheim at open.ac.uk
Mon Dec 1 19:34:05 CST 2003


John F. Sowa wrote:
> Murray and Pat,
> 
> We must support XML for political and practical reasons.
> But not even the XML fanatics claim that XML is readable.
> 
> It is absolutely essential to make the presentation of
> the semantics readable.  If Pat finds it convenient to
> write the spec in KIF notation, then I am all for it,
> at least for the Dec. 12th version.
[...]

I find it pretty funny that you consider XML unreadable but
consider KIF readable. There are a lot of people who would
claim exactly the opposite, given that any nontrivial KIF
statement requires one to be able to balance parens, whereas
it's pretty simple to see XML end tags.

Point is, I wouldn't base the decision that much on readability,
since it's in the eye of the beholder. Pat's comment that the
target audience (your intended beholders) and their understanding
and experience are really more important. Among the W3C crowd,
there's only a handful who know KIF, but all of them know XML.
Who's your target audience, really? John Sowa, or the W3C crowd?

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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