Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 234.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com> (51)
Subject: Re: 16.231 why the #? theory vs practice
[2] From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com> (105)
Subject: Re: 16.231 why the #? theory vs practice
[3] From: John Zuern <zuern@hawaii.edu> (27)
Subject: theory/practice
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 07:05:28 +0100
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com>
Subject: Re: 16.231 why the #? theory vs practice
At 01:32 AM 9/30/2002, Jennifer De Beer wrote:
>Dear Willard & humanists,
>
>On the theory and practice of encoding. In teaching a course on HTML I
>stumbled across the following: Many reference sources on HTML will insist
>that when encoding a/any color, the RGB color value should be preceded by
>an hash e.g.
><BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
>and yet, quite by accident (memory failure), I omitted the hash in numerous
>examples. Even so, the colors were rendered, both in IE5.5 and NN4.7 on
>Win2000. Reminded of the recent anniversary of the :-) I wondered about
>the history of this hash. A cursory glance via Google on this matter
>produced nothing substantive.
A quick excavation at the w3.org web site, where many of the web
specifications can be found, shows the six-digit hex codes showing up in
the HTML 3.2 specification of January 14 1997
(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32). It reads: "Colors are given in the sRGB
color space as hexadecimal numbers (e.g. COLOR="#C0FFC0"), or as one of 16
widely understood color names...."
>Out of sheer curiosity I wondered whether
>fellow Humanists had a clue or two as to why one uses the hash when it is
>seemingly not required.
So the question becomes "what do you mean by 'required'"? The besetting
problem with HTML since its inception has been that "required" could mean
either of two things. If we mean "required by the specification", then the
questions come up of *which* specification, and how we detect and enforce
conformance. This color business in particular is a good example, since
SGML validation against an HTML DTD would not, in itself, enforce
validation of the color syntax described above (much less the more complex
color syntaxes allowed by later W3C specifications). Yet if we mean "who
cares about some document on the Internet, what matters is what's required
by the browser" then the question arises of which browser, which version,
etc. etc.
>PS: I'm not inclined to think that this is a browser compatibility matter.
Netscape and IE for some years tracked each others' exception handling
(viz.: error handling) to avoid being the browser that didn't work with one
or another popular trick or workaround. They may still be doing it, though
thankfully now the standards are much more robust and it actually makes
sense to refer to the public specification as the authority on what is and
is not "required".
Cheers,
Wendell
======================================================================
Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 07:06:01 +0100
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: 16.231 why the #? theory vs practice
From: Osher Doctorow osher@ix.netcom.com, Mon. Sept. 30, 2002 6:10AM
Brian Whatcott's physics site seems interesting, but I think that the views
of physicists on theory vs practice are quite complicated (as a mathematical
physicist and mathematician and statistician myself), and similarly for the
views of mathematicians and other scientists and philosophers. Roughly
speaking, there tends to be in almost all of these fields or disciplines an
imbalance between theory and practice, or more precisely the abstract and
the concrete. The Creative Geniuses usually have the least imbalance
(Leonardo Da Vinci, Pierre De Fermat, Kurt Godel, etc.). I suspect that
this is true in humanities as well. The world or universe itself is, I
suspect, a delicate balance between the two. This does not mean that the
Golden Mean is usually a better strategy or goal than taking a position that
is further away from the Mean, since Creative Geniuses usually are
nonconformists, but they do retain (I think) more of a Golden Mean view in
the abstract vs concrete case.
Osher Doctorow Ph.D.
One or More of California State Universities and Community Colleges
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 07:12:04 +0100
From: John Zuern <zuern@hawaii.edu>
Subject: theory/practice
Willard and others interested in theory/practice questions might find
Gadamer's work helpful, especially later essays in which he engages,
in tentative ways, with cybernetics. I'm thinking of the material collected
in Reason in the Age of Science (MIT P, 1981), especially "What is
Practice?" and "Hermeneutics as a Theoretical and Practical Task" and the
volume Praise of Theory (Yale UP, 1998). The section of Truth and Method
on "Language as the Medium of Hermeneutic Experience" contains what for me
is a very fine description of the dialectic of theory and practice in
terms of ongoing concept-formation (Begriffsbildung).
I'd like to add my own theory/practice query: can anyone direct me to work
on the concept of "application" that moves between the term's use with
reference to interpretation (the application of a theory or a rule to a
particular phenomenon) and its use in computing (an application program)?
In trying to think through hermeneutic problems that arise in critical
studies of new media literature and art, I'm wondering if it might be
useful to reflect on what we mean, exactly, by an "application" in both
criticism and programming. Any references and/or thoughts on this will be
welcome.
Thanks.
John
___________________________________________________
John Zuern
Associate Professor, Department of English
Kuykendall Hall 402, 1733 Donaghho Road
University of Hawai`i
Honolulu, HI 96822
zuern@hawaii.edu (808) 956-3019 fax: (808) 956-3083
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~zuern
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