From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Mon Dec 27 1999 - 10:22:07 MST
Jackdaw epistemology may have prompted Rik to write:
>Links belong, in the eyes of a writer, to pieces of text,
>so that is the most natural place to put them.
I believe that you believe that. If the only writer that mattered were the
original author of a document, if the world were divided into _authors_ and
_readers_, and texts were the eternal sacred property of the original
_authors_, I might agree with you. But I've been to the mountaintop. As
long as links have to be embedded in "their" text, every other user of the
document in question is done a massive disservice.
I take it you're unfamiliar with the work of Theodor H. Nelson. See Nelson,
_Literary Machines_ for a concise if loopy overview of an alternative model
and a description of what it gets you.
You keep thinking I'm complaining about layout. I'm not, really, I'm not.
I want people to be able to link to and from _anything_: this passage of
music, that snippet in a long chunk of RealAudio, the nose on Teddy
Roosevelt in that photograph of Mount Rushmore, Mona Lisa's smile. I want
the links to be bi-directional (such that "to" and "from" are matters of
arbitrary convention). I want typed links, and good filtering. I want
transclusion and transcopyright. I wouldn't object to micropayment royalties.
HTML as it stands does very little of this. Ka-Ping Yee's CRIT and the
Third Voice folks do a little more.
But none of it has anything to do with graphic blandishments.
>Do you have any requirements for or ideas about what
>something "fundamentally better" should be like?
See above. The requirements or ideas have been around in print since 1973/1985.
>I think that links will still have to remain part of
>the content (as opposed to layout or something else)
>of the future web since they _are_ directly related
>to content.
Yes, you're absolutely right, they *are* content. But they do not belong
embedded in the text. That's a fundamentally flawed approach. The simplest
example being: If I want to add a fine-grained link to someone else's
document, I need write permission to the document. FEH!
Sorry for the styled text, I got carried away. :)
Crit attempts to solve this one thing. It is still sorely hampered by other
features of HTML, such as frames. And edits of the target document can make
your carefully-crafted fine-grained "to"-link fall to the floor and just
refer to the entire document. And it doesn't scale too well. But it's a
finger pointing to something better.
www.crit.org
MMB
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