From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 26 1999 - 19:42:33 MST
'What is your name?' 'Michael M. Butler.' 'Do you deny having written
the following?':
> But how do I do, for instance, place an embedded link in a passage of
> music? _Should_ I?
How would you place ANY kind of forward link in a passage of music? Should
you? This problem is in no way restricted to embedding, nor does
embedding make this problem better or worse.
> How do I link every occurrence of a musical motif (as a span set) to my
> comments on it?
Musical motifs can't be identified automatically. You'd forward link to
another summary document, written by human or intelligent agent, with
forward links to all or most of the important works in that motif. If
you really cared, you'd link to every single document which that document
links to by copying-and-pasting its links, though, frankly, I think that's
more trouble than it's worth.
You'd find the summary document by following a backlink to it.
> Embedded linking remains a problem. "Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a
> leg."
Thus far, you haven't presented me with any problems which are unique to
embedding or that are unworkable in an embedded-link system (or even
harder). In general, it would surprise me a lot if you could. It's easy
to extract all of the forward links from any embedded-link document, and
any meta-info about a document can and should be a separate document in
the system, simply forward linking to the document in question.
I don't regard the system I described to be a quick-fix; it satisfies all
of the requirements of a Xanadu system as Nelson laid them out. When we
have ubiquitous anonymous micropayments, we're all done.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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