email DTD & categories

From: earth (earth@hyperreal.org)
Date: Thu Aug 03 2000 - 12:54:07 PDT


eugene:
>5. Looking over the DTD, I realized I left out tags for categorizing
>e-mail. I'll add those in the next rev.

  I'm not sure what you have in mind for this, but I have a feature
suggestion for any categorization systems that get implemented :)
I could explain this possibly lengthy argument in person, but it
may be obvious enough without it.

  One of the ideas that I've been trying to get my friends in various
data-management positions to consider is encoding not only
categorization, but some identification of /type/ of categorization.

  In the overall scheme of things, I believe that there should be a
standard for this cat-typing, imagine something like MIME types,
but in the short term its actually functional just to include with
any coded categorization some unique identifier like:

Categorization="OHS-R1"

This could also potentially just be encoded in each category itself:

Email Category="OHSR1::Email::XML" (or whatever )

...or some other way to machine recognize which system or taxonomy
or whatever this current category encoding should be understood to
fit inside. Then, later, when the categorization changes, it is trivial
to translate from the old categorization to the new one instead of having
to do all-at-once changeovers, simple hash functions can handle the
change and base documents don't have to change.

I think there are a number of other benefits to doing this, but I will
save them for later :)

bcl



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:57:48 PDT