Re: Structure vs. appearance in HTML

Philippe-Andre Prindeville (philipp@res.enst.fr)
Sat, 23 Sep 95 07:36:49 +0200


On Sep 22, 15:35, Joe English wrote:
> > This last one is dubious. I have no way of saying, find me all
> > occurences of "Sprint" (as a proper noun, ie. name) in a document
> > or set of documents, skipping "sprint" the verb or noun. Obiously,
> > "... winning the men's 100m sprint." does not pertain to
> > telecommunications or American corporate culture.
>
> This is true. Yet things like Lycos manage to do a decent job
> of finding information in spite of that.

I have not had the same experiences. I often see a lot of
completely unrelated stuff turn up in my searches...

> It would be great if the entire Web were fully semantically
> tagged, with a rich set of CApH-style topic maps. I keep
> thinking of Star Trek, where Captain Picard can say "Computer,
> tell me about twentieth century North American telecommunications
> networks and track and field events" and the computer gives
> him an answer. If the Web were semantically tagged, that
> would actually be possible!

Would it? How many searchable keys would you say this message
contained? Not more than 10 by my count...

> HTML does a not-too-bad job for very little investment.

We probably don't have the same expectations if you classify
it as "not-too-bad".

Anyone from TEI following this thread? Someone want to throw
there $0.02 in?

> > > This last is something that few other text markup languages
> > > have been able to accomplish.
> >
> > To be honest there aren't that many.
>
> ?!?!?
>
> Do you consider two or three hundred "not that many"?

How did you come up with that number? I was thinking of ODA,
DCA, RTF, SGML, etc... There certainly aren't three hundred
of them in that case.

-Philip