Re: Correction Re: Foreseeing the Web, was Re: CONFESSIONS OF A CHEERFULLIBERTARIAN By David Brin

From: hal@finney.org
Date: Thu Dec 07 2000 - 00:47:16 MST


Michael M. Buttler quotes Ted Nelson at
http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html
> "The Xanadu® project did not 'fail to invent HTML'. HTML is precisely
> what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going
> outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version
> management, no rights management."

I've been reading the ideas of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who can rightly be
said to have invented the web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) he
founded is now promoting XML as a lingua franca for the web. Lee sees
XML as a way to promote automated web reading, so that web pages can
present data in machine-readable XML which is automatically translated
to nice looking HTML for humans. The result will be that both humans
and their software agents can browse the web with ease. Lee calls this
the "Semantic Web" and describes it as an important part of his initial
vision of what the web could become.

Associated with XML is the linking spec, XLink, which lets you set up
hyperlinks between XML documents. This is intended to address many of
the deficiencies with HTML linking. The XLink Design Principles have
a number of interesting points. Some excerpts:

   1.1 XLink Shall Be Straightforwardly Usable Over the Internet

     It is a requirement to allow for "open systems" of linking where
     not all resources are under the control of a single person or
     organization (along with easier "closed systems"). For example,
     broken links must be tolerated.

     Both unidirectional links (common on the Web today) and
     multidirectional links (commonly used in commercial hypermedia
     systems) must be supported.

   1.2 XLink Shall Be Usable by a Wide Variety of Link Usage Domains
       and of Classes of Linking Application Software

     XLink should not favor particular domains over others. For example,
     it should be usable in scholarly annotation, cross-referencing in
     technical publications, and other domains of link usage.

   1.3 The XLink Expression Language Shall Be XML

   1.4 The XLink Design Shall Be Prepared Quickly

   1.5 The XLink Design Shall Be Formal and Concise

   1.6 XLinks Shall Be Human-Readable

   1.7 XLinks May Reside Outside the Documents in Which the Participating
       Resources Reside

     It is a requirement that XLink provide a means to do sophisticated
     out-of-line linking, in order for it to offer scalability and relief
     from HTML linking problems. This does not mean that all links must
     be out-of-line; on the contrary, the "Straightforwardly Usable Over
     the Internet" principle demands that simple in-line linking also
     be accounted for.

   1.8 XLink Shall Represent the Abstract Structure and Significance
       of Links

   1.9 XLink Must Be Feasible to Implement

     It is a nongoal for XLink to be easy to implement because we
     recognize that certain functionality, in particular out-of-line link
     handling with extended document groups, is inherently difficult. Our
     goal is to make implementation at least tractable; that is, we must
     consider implementability in our deliberations.

For more information on these new technologies, see www.w3.org. I have
found the tutorials at www.xml.com to be useful as well.

Hal



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:32:14 MST