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Sure. It made sense because it was just a way of hooking up documents for researchers. The ambitions may have been more grand, but a good designer scopes to the requirements at hand. But HTML didn't stay simple long and the HTML way of doing things didn't last long. It turned back into windows, relational dbs, SQL embedded, ODBC connect strings, embedded scripts, and so on rather quickly. Coulda hadda MAC. :-) I'm not suggesting conspiracy; just hubris. In the case I was citing, I was beaten for suggesting the fellow might want to do some research in a library because all things worth knowing (particularly then) were not on "The Web". More things are now and that is a good thing. Some things aren't anymore, and that is a good thing too. I'd simply rather not require people to believe they have to do this or that everyone will. Libraries still have books, corporations still have private processes, and governments still have secrets for reasonable reasons and sometimes unreasonable ones. And yes, that is a weak definition for hypermedia which is why I posted Nelson's and Conklin's definitions a few mails back. This idea has evolved, yet the best paper, in my opinion, was the one that really kicked off the party: http://www.histech.rwth-aachen.de/www/quellen/engelbart/ahi62index.html That said, again, the hybrid systems are the real engines of the Internet and The Web. ASP is actually a pretty neat thing even if a really ugly file. len From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@s...] On Fri, 2002-03-01 at 15:03, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: >> From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@p...] >> >> Plus, the W3C folks have always used a definition of hypermedia that meant: >> "all information, everywhere, hyperlinked." > > That's what is specifically and particularly wrong > with the W3C. That's hubris, pure and simple. It also seems strange to me given that perhaps the most innovative feature of HTML was that it did far _less_ than most hypermedia systems attempted. I have to doubt that there's a real benefit to dropping the hypermedia net over everything. We _could_ redefine the key-based connections inside relational databases as hyperlinks, or redefine the tables themselves as information connected by hyperlinks, but I don't know that it's helpful. I was a hypertext/hypermedia person before HTML (on the cards side of the house). While the foundation of my interest in XML is definitely hypermedia, I'd rather not water down the word hypermedia by including "all information, everywhere, hyperlinked."
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