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From: Paul T [mailto:pault12@p...] >I imagine people writing A HREFs before the >first HTML browser would exist. How would >we call them? Religious fanatics, I guess. Ummm... we called them hypertext experts. They were also called in some circles and some agencies, "the lunatic left wing fringe of SGML". And so they were. Hey, didja ever see deRose or Bosak on a bad day? Big hair... Clark always looked clean but he is British. I suspect he is also crazy deep inside but that natural British reserve hides it most of the time until an atavism bursts out and he decides its time to get out his knife. :-) Me, nuts to the core, but everyone knows it as soon as they meet me. Something about the hair.... Anchor tags have been around since waaaay before HTML, even SGML. The HyTimers took a shot at standardizing them into clinks, but were denied by a goal line stand. And because at that time, the real issues of associating semantics were badly enunciated. >WWW has been started when TBL tried to solve >a *particular* task. Not with the holy sacrifice. >The detailes are in the Book "Weaving the Web". No offense, but the problems of markup had been solved by that time. He added HTTP so a URL would have an implemented semantic. That's a good thing. But do any systems actually negotiate the meaning of <a href= anymore? If we still used clinks, they could but I don't think anyone will. If they use a URN they might have to, but gad.... So when it came time to burn a goat, TimBL burned ISO so the heathen masses would be satisfied. Like, somebody had to be the loser, right? We need blood. Our gods just aren't satisfied with vegetable fritters. > > No more letters from me on RDDL. Some people > > use it. This is fine, but when I've used the word RDDL, > > I was *not* talking about current RDDL ( neither was > > Len talking about current RDF, I think ), I'm very sorry > > to use the RDDL buzzword and I would try never use > > it again. len was talking about the problems of discovery of semantics given raw markup (no schema, no n number of definition languages) and said that can be a negotiation process. One may have to negotiate the technology for the negotiation too. Long ago, such things were discussed in hypermedia theory circles, AI circles, etc. Where I agree with you is that for a particular semantic, rendering and clicking on an anchor, solutions such as HTML and maybe RDDL cut the Gordian knot and say "just do it this way". That is moreorless the "dominate the semantic: my way or the highway" answer. It is good enough for rendering and light location processes. But when you get down to business processes, it probably isn't good enough. So we get all the web services infrastructure for discovery, location, negotiation, and remediation. That's a much more complicated layer of semantics, but not undoable. What we are up against these days are the really difficult problems of very large network integrated computing: the real meaning of the old phrase, "The Network Is The Computer". The good news is because of the Internet/WWW, there is a working infrastructure to build on, experiment with, and eventually (but not toooo soon), standardize. We didn't have that when the lunatic was "in my head". but, I'll still see you on the dark side of the moon. Leigh, how does RDDL compare to the alternatives? len
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