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"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
>
> ... An unlimited view of hypertext
> is not the same as a realistic one. I think
> TimBL has a realistic view until I see
> quotations like that. If that is from Tim,
> he really should get out more.
You said the other day that the essence of hypermedia is nodes and
links. If that's so, then what problem domains do not naturally lend
themselves to hypermedia?
> ...
> Of course you don't. And we haven't. You are
> winning a lot of converts out here, but the code
> is on the loading docks and it is not as Leigh's
> article suggests, that we are content to let it
> fall apart later, but that just as we in the SGML
> industry had to face up to the reality of HTML
> ubiquity, we may not have a choice.
HTML did its job well. There is a differnce between being technically
impure and bein incapable of doing the job put before you. One of the
inventors of SOAP says he doesn't know if RPC will scale up to the size
of the Internet. Most people on xml-dev seem to think it won't. Who is
left as a true believer? The RPC bit of SOAP won't work right and what's
left when you take that away is too generic to be interoperable.
It boils down to this: Tim Berners-Lee built the world's most successful
and widely used information system. Everything I have ever read by him
says that he believes that the secret is the universal namespace. This
makes perfect intuitive sense to me. If our task (with web services) is
to bring machine-to-machine communications ot the same level then it
seems clear to me that our central goal is to get machine processable
information into that universal namespace. It seems more like vision
than hubris to me.
Paul Prescod
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