RE: [xml-dev] Expertise and Innovation - was Re: [xml-dev] Non-Borg servers can authenticate Borg clients (Was Re: [xml-dev] Re: Cookies at XML Europe 2004 -- Call for Participation)

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

It was the devaluing of link maintenance ("let 'em snap").  
Before that, people broke their intellectual necks trying 
to come up with non-system identifiers.  Tim essentially 
got rid of non-system identifiers.  In the 'web architecture', 
it is all one system called the 'universe'.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Joshua Allen [mailto:joshuaa@microsoft.com]

> 	Those who said that Tim's work was "trivial", or "not-new" or
> "didn't solve interesting problems" were right. But those who said it

Did "memex" have the concept of universal identifiers?  I know that some
of the other hypermedia systems at the time permitted linking to a
common global id, but it was cumbersome and not the "normal" way of
doing links.  The WWW is still lagging functionality of many of those
hypermedia systems, but the fact that using "universal" identifiers was
the "standard" way of identifying targets was at least as important as
having a killer app IMO.  I think that the URI, not the hyperlink, is
the fundamental innovation of the WWW -- and in fact the true potential
of the web lies with use of URIs beyond hypermedia.

(And by "universal", I mean you have a string identifier that is going
to give the exact same result no matter whether called by a user on a
workstation in Singapore or a user at CERN.)