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   What is "the Web"

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At 05:05 AM 4/26/2002 -0400, AndrewWatt2000@aol.com wrote:
>The questions I raised on list a few days back about what W3C's aims are 
>were, as far as I recall, left unanswered. If the W3C is to "take the Web 
>to its full potential", surely we need answers to the questions such as:
>What is "the Web"? (currently/recently a topic on TAG)

There is no one thing called "the Web", there are many different loosely 
bound technologies being used in a wide variety of ways. The web services 
architecture, the semantic web, the HTML + HTTP web page architecture, and 
the data integration scenarios envisioned by some people in the XML Query 
community are all examples of web architectures. There are others.

So asking "What is the Web" is a bit like asking "What is Data"? I think it 
is a mistake to come up with one prescriptive answer to the question.

>Its full potential to do what?
>For whose benefit?

The loosely coupled architecture of the web means we don't have to answer 
those questions for the user, and that is a strength, not a weakness. It 
would be very productive for the TAG to write some white papers showing a 
handful of web architectures and visions, doing different things, for the 
benefit of different communities. It would be counterproductive to come up 
with one answer to the set of questions you ask in this email.

Jonathan





 

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