Posted by dorayme on 02/16/07 01:17

In article <0001HW.C1FA5A300009C20FB022094F@news.supernews.com>,
TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@mac.com> wrote:

> Oops, I forgot, validation is
> apparently useless.

To point out the limitations of validators, what they can and
cannot do, what their real purpose is and what you can profitably
use them for, should not invite this reaction. It is a rather
complicated thing but basically a validator will tell you if a
document conforms in certain respects to the declared or assumed
standard for that doc in a narrow formal sense. It says nothing
about semantics, the meaningfulness, neatness, easy readability
or accessibility of your efforts, much less the quality of being
easy to upgrade. All these latter mentioned qualities are
notoriously difficult for earthling created machines to
understand. Not impossible but difficult.

Earthlings, on the other hand, are meaning machines par
excellence. That is what they are good for apart from killing.
And even then, note, earthlings have meaningful reasons to do so
(I said meaningful, not good reasons.)

--
dorayme

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