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Rethinking this one, I'm leaning toward a more radical or more conservative position. The press are right; there is NO web. It's one of those illusions like seeing animals in clouds. The Internet exists as a system of hardware and protocols, but the web only exists insofar as someone or some group takes existing content, hooks it together, and calls that a web. There ain't no "The Web". SGML/XML can work without touching HTTP, or even URIs if the namespace mechanisms are ignored. That is the problem with that mechanism: it wires content invisibly to a protocol, then insists it is independent of that system. The further down the path we go to insist then that the namespace has a semantic, the more we become hardwired to that system. There isn't a whole there; just pieces to wire up into various systems with varying degrees of interoperation depending on the way these are hooked together, much like a component-based DVD player (cheap or expensive depending on source, QoS, etc). So the TAG doesn't have a unifying job to do; just to make sure the individual pieces work in the most common assemblies presented to them for consideration. The rest is individual interests or smaller and larger communities of interest, but a unifying architecture called "the web" doesn't exist. What we keep doing when we insist on it is much like the investment bankers who made shares available to preferred customers for flip it sales over dutch auctions. (Frontline did a good expose on that one on PBS last night.) len -----Original Message----- From: David Orchard [mailto:david.orchard@b...] > Would the web still be the web without HTTP? > > len Fascinating question. Is the web identified by protocols, formats, identifiers, or some combination? Is the web: 1) HTML, URLs, HTTP? 2) XML and HTML, URLs, HTTP 3) XML, URLs, HTTP 4) XML, URIs 5) XML and HTML, URIs 6) URIs or some other combinations? I tend to personally think the web is #5 and it typically uses HTTP. If I build an RDF application using URIs and I use gnutella/tcp to distribute it, is it part of the web? If I build a SOAP document and ship it via SMTP, is it part of the web?
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