Re: HM.applications-Translations

[Mark Brownell <gizmotron@earthlink.net>]

Hi Len,

> 
> It is good code.  It installed, it ran, and when 
> I selected the pre-selected terms, it returned 
> article abstracts.  How extensible are the search 
> terms, who extends them, and so on?
> 

Each document that is loaded has the option to declare search terms. The 
sub-browser displays them in the search Items list. So this process is up to 
the author to present. That is why a set of search terms loaded in the first 
document of a semantic portal would facilitate the meaningfulness of the author 
or group presenting that portal. This is going to tell you allot about my knowledge, 
I guess, of XML. What do you mean here, "How extensible are the search terms."


> It appears to be annotative and that is essentially 
> a hermaneutic tool.  That is useful but so is a 
> a help file indexing tool relying on an inverted index 
> based on term occurrences the writer annotates.  
> 

The sub-browser is a document query system based on the numerical location 
in that document, or in a MTML object, of the text being parsed. This occurs 
at the moment that the human user selects fragments that match these search 
terms mentioned earlier. MTML is the markup device, the sub-browser is 
basically a tool that gathers information for display purposes. Now RDF is a 
markup that can have the same searchable indexing capabilities that you 
mentioned above. That is what I'm working on right now.

> What functions make it more than that?  In other words, what did I miss?

This generic tool has no DBMS function to it. So you definitely missed that. I pulled 
back from my earlier experiments to this single function tool in this form. The old 
stuff had XML transformation capabilities, slideshow with sound auto feed abilities, 
image presentation, and video presentation abilities. I just felt that in the process 
of starting over from scratch, to add speed to it, I would just work on one single 
idea at a time.

> 
> BTW, just curious:  
> 
> 1.  Why did you use Shockwave for building the component? 

Because I wanted to enhance HTML in HTML's own user environment. XML 
seams to be best delivered as a HTML document in its final viewer form in a browser. 
I felt that an enhancement to HTML or XHTML would not conflict with the goals of
XML development. In fact XML could be used to deliver some very interesting MTML 
enhanced HTML.

> 
> 2.  Do element instances such as 
> 
>          <less hyperbolic> less hyperbolic </less hyperbolic> 
> 
>     parse as well-formed XML?
> 

They can if the document has a single root level to it and the author makes the 
document well-formed. The document can also work well in the sub-browser if 
element tags are not well-formed. This is a numerical based system that works 
without a hierarchy. That is almost blasphemy to a XML coder. HTML in a browser 
such as IE or NN is not much more than an over glorified fax machine. I was trying 
to give power to the machine using the documents that it downloads. Much of the 
user's machine is just sitting there waiting for the next document to render. Server 
side CGI and java applets have made it a better information tool, but not much.

Mark