Rob Styles wrote:
>
> ... Get rid of
> Marc-Speak! Sure that's going to be really hard, but as long as we use
> 100$a in our day-to-day language to mean an author's name there will be
> a barrier between the catalogue and the rest of the world.
>
But how to speak instead? There are two things to consider, leaving
aside the massive task of re-education:
1. The brevity and precision of Marc-Speak will be hard to rival, esp.
by verbal XML tags. They tend to be unbearably twisted or
unpronounceable / unlearnable, esp. with upper/lower case.
2. Verbal tags are language-bound, not international. Marc-Speak is.
This is not to say there cannot be a more efficient numbering of
data elements, but it has to be codes, not words, or you lose those
two big advantages. But feel free to make suggestions!
I think it's just a presentation issue! Anyone can display a marc
record with verbal designations instead of tags to make it
understood. (The risk being, however, that people think they
understand when in fact they don't because they lack the background
knowledge necessary for precise understanding. Or are you saying
we better get rid of precision? Your posting suggested otherwise.)
B.Eversberg
Received on Tue Jan 16 2007 - 12:09:39 EST