CNN’s “screaming” header for urgent news. Screencap from CNN When big news stories evolve into tragedies and people are flocking to read the latest online, website design becomes the backdrop for grave information. And as Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgins points out, you can tell a lot about how different sites react to tragic stories by checking out what…
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When I was first getting started with Ruby, I heard a lot of talk about blocks, and how you could cast them to Procs by using the & operator when calling methods. Last week, in comments about my last post (Ruby is NOT a Callable Oriented Language (It’s Object Oriented)), I heard that claim again. To be honest, I never really thought that much about it, and the idea…
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This textbook helps undergraduate students of language and linguistics taking their first steps in one of the core areas of grammar, introducing them to the basic ideas, insights, and techniques of contemporary semantic theory. Requiring no special background knowledge, the book starts with everyday observations about word meaning and useand then hightlights the role of structure…
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Often, developers being new to schema.org and the usage of semantic SEO techniques are confused about the relationship between schema.org and Microdata, Microformats, RDFa, GoodRelations, and other standards. Here is a quick explanation that I have been given so often that I assume it may be useful for others: When you expose structured data from within Web content by adding…
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The meaning of SPAN is this is a (generic) span of (e.g., text) content . Compare to DIV, which means this is a logical division (i.e., a generic document section) . SPAN is mainly a hook for hanging styles off of (so you can use instead of ). The DIV and SPAN elements, in conjunction with the id and class attributes, offer a generic mechanism for adding structure to documents…
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As their name says, this is for semantic purposes only. It s for improving the automated processing of documents. You can as well use normal div element but for true semantic access you need special tags. You as the human reader can visually distinguish all the page elements and more importantly understand the content. However, machines are dumb and cannot do this: Imagine…
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Semiotics is divided into three very important areas in visual communication: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Lets try to get a deeper understanding of each. According to Lester (2006), syntatics is the study of the ways signs are combined with each other to form complex messages. To make it simpler, syntax is the way signs are organized and formed in order to create an image…
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This morning I was reading Amy Wrzesniewski, a Professor of Organizational behavior at Yale School of Management, whose research is focused on how people construct meaning of their work. She looks especially at contexts where this work is challenging to describe, or difficult to see (i.e. virtual work). I think this is apt for those of us who have careers that involve professional…
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There are a few new chapters available today in our book Design for the Web. We opened beta access with chapters on career advice in design disciplines, a look into color theory, and how to organize your app visually. The new chapter on Writing Semantic Markup dives into the technical side, covering how to harness HTML5 elements to make your code more readable and improve your…
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Some Theoretical Implications of Ethnographic Semantics. Working Paper of the Language Behavior Research Laboratory, No. 24. Ethnographic semantics is that discipline which seeks to understand human cognition through an analysis of the cognitive content of linguistic expressions: that is, the systematic study of the meanings of words and the role of these meanings in cognitive…
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This page is for the section (course number 130c/230e) accompanying Linguist 130a/230a. We will build on the technical tools introduced in the lecture, practice their use, and explore the similarities and differences of what we are doing with logic. Section time: 5-6pm, Tuesday Location: 260-012 13 Intro to (basic) set theory Types of adjectives Some good (optional) resources:…
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This is written in response to a But if the emerges it may or may not be semantic. For example social networks are NOT semantic today, even though they contain various kinds of links between people and other things. So what makes a graph “semantic?” How is the semantic graph different from social networks like Facebook for example? Many people think that the difference between…
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This volume is a collection of original contributions that address the problem of words and their meaning. This represents a still difficult and controversial area within various disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. Although all of these disciplines have to tackle the issue, so far there is no overarching methodology agreed upon by researchers…
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Your footer. It’s easily the most neglected portion of your message. It is usually just where all the “boring” parts of your message go – the legal jargon, your contact info, and so on. But if your reader gets down that far, it means that they’ve read your entire message. So, congratulations. Though it might seem unlikely, your email footer can easily be ruined (just like the…
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Users don’t read websites the way they read books. They read clusters of pages from many sites that they assemble for themselves or with others they trust; a hunt and gather process that shapes their experience. To help construct a compelling user experience, we content creators need to think outside the box of the website. We need to think about Dynamic Semantic Clusters…
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From its inception in the early 1990s through to the foreseeable future, the World Wide Web is a developing phenomenon, constantly evolving in response to new technologies and the changing expectations of users. The Web of today is a very different animal to the version that first gained widespread acceptance in the mid-1990s. Likewise, it seems that the Web as we now know…
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I ll be the first to admit I can get a bit pedantic at times. I ve even gotten in the habit of calling myself The Pedantic Panther when I get particularly picky in my writing group. But the thing is, words matter. Word choice matters. Here s one of my favorite examples of how that works in the broader world: Here are a few words and phrases that are used a lot within library…
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Key Difference: Pragmatics, Syntax, Morphology and Phonology are different sub-fields or branches of linguistics. Pragmatics deals with the study of language by considering the context in which it is used. Syntax is the study of the structural aspect of language by dealing with phrase and sentence formation. Morphology is the study of minimal units of meaning which includes…
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