Re: Structural v. semantic markup

Mike Piff (M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk)
Tue, 1 Nov 1994 11:48:47

%>Structural markup means that you name document elements in the context
%>their relationship with one another, the whole, and other documents.
%>
%>Semantic markup, which is uncommon, associates document elements with
%>lexical relationships. For example, if I make a reference to Microsoft, I
%>might include a semantic tag whose lexical relationship is "is a" and
%>content is "public company." Relationships might also be fuzzy, as in our
%>Topics, rather than explicit.
%>

Could you repeat that? I didn't quite catch it.

Do you mean that <section> is structural, but <theorem>, <proof>,
<implies>, <xor> are semantic? Or are only the last two symbol place-
holders semantic?

What if <Section> is a place-holder which might start a section,
might start a chapter, but possibly does nothing at all? Or possibly
starts a section and at the same time creates a table of contents
entry, opens a solution file for problems in the section, displays a
message on the terminal and some other things? Is that semantic or
structural?

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%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK. +44 114 282 4431 e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
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