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From: Paul T [mailto:pault12@pacbell.net]
>I imagine people writing A HREFs before the
>first HTML browser would exist. How would
>we call them? Religious fanatics, I guess.
Ummm... we called them hypertext experts.
They were also called in some circles and
some agencies, "the lunatic left wing
fringe of SGML". And so they were. Hey,
didja ever see deRose or Bosak on a bad
day? Big hair... Clark always looked clean but he
is British. I suspect he is also crazy
deep inside but that natural British
reserve hides it most of the time until
an atavism bursts out and he decides its
time to get out his knife. :-) Me, nuts to the
core, but everyone knows it as soon as they
meet me. Something about the hair....
Anchor tags have been around since waaaay
before HTML, even SGML. The HyTimers took a shot
at standardizing them into clinks, but
were denied by a goal line stand. And
because at that time, the real issues of
associating semantics were badly enunciated.
>WWW has been started when TBL tried to solve
>a *particular* task. Not with the holy sacrifice.
>The detailes are in the Book "Weaving the Web".
No offense, but the problems of markup had been
solved by that time. He added HTTP so a URL
would have an implemented semantic. That's a
good thing. But do any systems actually negotiate
the meaning of <a href= anymore? If we still
used clinks, they could but I don't think anyone will.
If they use a URN they might have to, but gad....
So when it came time to burn a goat, TimBL burned ISO
so the heathen masses would be satisfied. Like,
somebody had to be the loser, right? We need blood.
Our gods just aren't satisfied with vegetable fritters.
> > No more letters from me on RDDL. Some people
> > use it. This is fine, but when I've used the word RDDL,
> > I was *not* talking about current RDDL ( neither was
> > Len talking about current RDF, I think ), I'm very sorry
> > to use the RDDL buzzword and I would try never use
> > it again.
len was talking about the problems of discovery of
semantics given raw markup (no schema, no n number
of definition languages) and said that can be a
negotiation process. One may have to negotiate
the technology for the negotiation too. Long ago,
such things were discussed in hypermedia theory
circles, AI circles, etc. Where I agree with
you is that for a particular semantic, rendering
and clicking on an anchor, solutions such as
HTML and maybe RDDL cut the Gordian knot and
say "just do it this way". That is moreorless
the "dominate the semantic: my way or the highway"
answer. It is good enough for rendering and light
location processes.
But when you get down to business processes,
it probably isn't good enough. So we get
all the web services infrastructure for
discovery, location, negotiation, and remediation.
That's a much more complicated layer of semantics,
but not undoable. What we are up against these
days are the really difficult problems of very
large network integrated computing: the real meaning
of the old phrase, "The Network Is The Computer".
The good news is because of the Internet/WWW, there
is a working infrastructure to build on, experiment
with, and eventually (but not toooo soon), standardize.
We didn't have that when the lunatic was "in my head".
but, I'll still see you on the dark side of the moon.
Leigh, how does RDDL compare to the alternatives?
len
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