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Sure. It made sense because it was just a way
of hooking up documents for researchers. The
ambitions may have been more grand, but a good
designer scopes to the requirements at hand.
But HTML didn't stay simple long and the HTML
way of doing things didn't last long. It turned
back into windows, relational dbs, SQL embedded,
ODBC connect strings, embedded scripts, and so
on rather quickly. Coulda hadda MAC. :-)
I'm not suggesting conspiracy; just hubris. In
the case I was citing, I was beaten for suggesting
the fellow might want to do some research in a library
because all things worth knowing (particularly then)
were not on "The Web". More things are now and
that is a good thing. Some things aren't anymore,
and that is a good thing too.
I'd simply rather not require people to believe
they have to do this or that everyone will. Libraries
still have books, corporations still have private
processes, and governments still have secrets for
reasonable reasons and sometimes unreasonable ones.
And yes, that is a weak definition for hypermedia
which is why I posted Nelson's and Conklin's definitions
a few mails back. This idea has evolved, yet the
best paper, in my opinion, was the one that really
kicked off the party:
http://www.histech.rwth-aachen.de/www/quellen/engelbart/ahi62index.html
That said, again, the hybrid systems are the real engines
of the Internet and The Web. ASP is actually a pretty
neat thing even if a really ugly file.
len
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
On Fri, 2002-03-01 at 15:03, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>> From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@prescod.net]
>>
>> Plus, the W3C folks have always used a definition of hypermedia that meant:
>> "all information, everywhere, hyperlinked."
>
> That's what is specifically and particularly wrong
> with the W3C. That's hubris, pure and simple.
It also seems strange to me given that perhaps the most innovative
feature of HTML was that it did far _less_ than most hypermedia systems
attempted.
I have to doubt that there's a real benefit to dropping the hypermedia
net over everything. We _could_ redefine the key-based connections
inside relational databases as hyperlinks, or redefine the tables
themselves as information connected by hyperlinks, but I don't know that
it's helpful.
I was a hypertext/hypermedia person before HTML (on the cards side of
the house). While the foundation of my interest in XML is definitely
hypermedia, I'd rather not water down the word hypermedia by including
"all information, everywhere, hyperlinked."
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