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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML, hypertext
 That is a good technical synopsis, Didier, so I won't attempt to reiterate it. I will touch on the other points. First, our navel discussions have a purpose. As I said, intelligence in the universe is locally originated and then only spreads by sharing taxons. Proximity in space and the origin in time affect the rate of that and that rate determines our overall learning curve. The web folded that space and things have gone considerably faster in our technical areas ever since. We make mistakes but we make more of them so we are learning faster than we did. Some local group might have gotten further faster, but being advanced is no guarantee of being able to communicate. What we don't recognize, we don't see or hear. In short, every time we do this addressing and data model thread, we get a few more near neighbors to understand the why and how of it. At some point, a critical density of neighbors will form a community of understanding large enough to build and share applications based on it. Extreme Markup must have gone awfully well this year. It is at the threshold of achieving that density of understanding that we will see another explosion of innovation in web application development. Will this be because what was groves becomes RDF? I suppose it could. Some are not comfortable with a predicate logic system and others adore the formality of that model. Groves stumbled not just in the timing of the introduction, ie, too far ahead of the general understanding so it almost slipped through the gaps and would have had it not been for the original and slow growing community of understanding, but also in the original difficulty of understanding the terms being presented. It took time for a lot of people to get past the Jorn Barger mentality of link and do, that overly simplistic and ultimately fatal assumption that addressing could be completely subsumed under a conflation of address and location (Jorn lad, you can walk up behind a woman and hit her with a stick and drag her into your cave, but you can't get her to cook a meal well or not slit your throat in the night that way. Try understanding her first.). RDF might have a larger community of understanding, but it also has a larger community of legacy to pull behind it not only in terms of previous applications (say metatags) but people who have to be convinced to use it for meta data modeling. It can't be done by fiat; SGML/HyTime proved that. Until a community of understanding is large enough to be self-sustaining, any concept that defines that community (culture is a sharing of sign systems, vocabularies if you will), it is always on life support. So it isn't just a matter of convincing the cobbler (whoever that is): one has to convince his competitors and the elves and dwarves that work for him too. The cost of the semantic web must be met with a host of new profitable applications. Otherwise, no money no thrills. For that to happen, a few virgins will be sacrificed and then, a few of them will build working useful applications that build on their ability to reason on and exchange the results of reason. Until then, we have the Barger stick. len -----Original Message----- From: Didier PH Martin [mailto:martind@n...] Hi Len, Even if this look navel discussion, in the context of what's happening with XML and the level of dissatisfaction we feel with the current direction. Maybe this kind of discussion may help us go back to the basics and what is good about the Web. Simply that: the web, the capacity to link things. This is why the linkage issue is so important. Especially in this decade in which we will have to link multimedia stuff with textual information (at least when broadband will take off - Anyway, Asia and the competitive pressure will help us to move toward that goal) 
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