Content or Metadata?

[rev-bob at gotc.com]

> > Operationally, my experience suggests that in stuff that is
> > not metadata, ordering matters.  The converse is true; if ordering matters,
> > it's probably not metadata.   There are exceptions but you have to
> > work pretty hard. -Tim
> 
> What about the list of authors of a scholarly paper?  Isn't that metadata for which
> order matters?

Maybe it matters to them, but not to me.  :)

Look, it's like I say on my site (if you catch the randomizer just right) - reality is 
holographic.  If you delve deep enough, any data you find will eventually serve as 
metadata for something else.  For instance (one of my favorites), digging into the roots of 
the word "testify" will eventually indicate that Greco-Roman society was pretty 
patriarchal in nature, even to the point of codifying this bias in their legal structure.  (The 
full chain of connections?  "Testify" comes from the same lexical root as "testicle" - 
because in Greco-Roman courts, you swore your oath on the family jewels.  Women not 
having testicles, this at least implies that a woman could not give testimony - which is an 
anti-woman bias in the legal structure.  Since you don't have such a thing in the court 
system without some social impetus, the natural conclusion is that the society regarded 
women as "less" than men - meaning that men ran things.)  Of course, this is far from 
relevant to XML, so I'll shut up about that now.  <g>

Perhaps this will get back to the thread at hand - has anyone yet figured out a decent 
way to attach accurate PICS ratings (esp. RSACi) to dynamic documents?  I've got a 
hack going right now that prevents subordinate data (random ads) from conflicting with 
the rating assigned to the primary data (the article on which the ad spot appears) - but 
that requires the use of an eight-field SQL query to select a conforming set of eligible ads 
(each of which is labeled with a minimum and maximum rating), and a random record is 
chosen from that set.  While this works, it is somewhat less than elegant....



 Rev. Robert L. Hood  | http://rev-bob.gotc.com/
  Get Off The Cross!  | http://www.gotc.com/

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