On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Dave Stubbs wrote:
> And if the occupancy is on a fish pond then it likely does
How do you know it's a fish pond? There is no tag that unambiguously
identifies the type of object it is. Instead there is a whole load of
tags to identify the object, and you have to have a lot of background
knowledge about the structure of the data to know which tags identify the
object type (and thus the context of the other tags) and which tags are
just describing attributes of the object.
> if [piste:lift] is not null and [occupancy] is not null then:
> print "piste:lift:occupancy = [occupancy]"
>
> wow. that was hard. And also demonstrates how completely pointless the
> namespace was.
How did you know that the piste:lift tag declares the object as being a
lift? That's right, you didn't unless you already had an underlying
knowledge of which tags identify the context and which don't.
>> This is completely stupid - yes, they might avoid coming up with new
>> unnamespaced tags and *shock* propose new namespaced tags instead. Why is
>> this a bad thing?
>
> you snipped the or: they'll attach meaningless drivel to the start of
> every tag as a substitute
What sort of meaningless drivel?
> which is effectively what you're doing anyway.
Except it is neither meaningless nor drivel.
> What you're doing provides nothing extra: I can throw it away and be
> left with the same information.
No, you can't - if you throw it away you lose the context of the tags.
The *only* way to recover the context information is to know which tag to
retrieve it from, which is not something you can do from the data alone.
Thus you have lost something which is not recoverable from the data you
have - you now need to go find an external data set as well.
- Steve
xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED] sip:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nexusuk.org/
Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence
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