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For anyone coming in late, this is the "kill all the lawyers" episode. In this series, I am the bad guy and Andrew and Ben are the brave heroes who have come to overthrow Wolfram and Hart. From: andrew welch [mailto:andrew.j.welch@g...] On 9/28/06, Len Bullard <cbullard@h...> wrote: > My problem with that description is how many web programmers or designers > are willing to suggest or document solutions without doing the research into > the topic to discover what solutions have been tried and what the results > were. >Does that really matter? If two people do similar work with similar >results, but aren't aware of each other, is that a problem? It doesn't have to be. If two people are doing the same work at the same time, that is normal. They are solving obvious or at least evident problems. If a person comes along and solves a problem others have already solved, that person may be wasting time, wasting resources, or may be improving on the solution. Style sheet based linking has been solved multiple times. As controversies go, it has a long lineage and because it is an obvious approach, it will go on and on. I've no problem with that. I'm asking questions and citing previous attempts to determine if the thread I started (Xlink Dead?) is revealing fresh information or thinking. So far, no. It outs yet another 'style sheets should encode the semantics' initiative. And I've no problem with that other than I like to know if such an effort is necessary or simply convenient. >> Two very serious problems emerge out of that: claiming credit where >> there is prior art making the IP situation difficult for everyone, and >> claims that lead to false eigen-index locking (the Google/Wikipedia >>effect). >Is IP there an issue here? I don't know. If he cites the prior art, there won't be one unless he stumbles into a patent. No one knew that Eolas was lurking until the lawsuits started. There are patents on XML. There is also prodigious prior art. Most of it goes unnoticed by Google because Google has a shallow and recent memory (the world of URIs). Fortunately, the humans have a longer one and so some people make a healthy living as consultants on patent cases. That is a side issue but I bring it up because the practice of 'we'll code now and ask for forgiveness later' is ok until one proposes a change to a standard that stumbles into the patent. Take your own risks at your own will, but don't ask others to do it without being willing to answer questions and withstand critique. >Also, googling for "false eigen-index locking" returns 3 results. So >even google doesn't know what you're talking about! Oh good. A fresh idea? Well, not really. http://pagerank.suchmaschinen-doktor.de/index/math.html http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~greif/Papers/gg_BIT.pdf Force is the feedback effect over time of the naïve indices in use. You may have missed earlier discussions on this list of the ease with which Google can be gamed. All inbound-linking systems that scale out of some boundary share that characteristic without filtering controls. One of those is vetting assertions against other assertions with time-variant properties or restricting the domain of the citation (eg, inverted indices restrict the domain to the book; library cards restrict it to the book title, author, date, etc; cross-domain indices make no assertions beyond location, and so on). Google knows exactly what I am talking about. They don't like to talk about it. The idea that a Google search returns an authoritative assertion is not an idea they endorse; naïve users do that for them. ><rant> >Sorry to be blunt Len, but my problem with some of your posts is the >sheer amount of noise. See above. I ask questions because I am familiar with the history of attempts to use style sheet declarations to associate functions to markup. Linking is a function but because of the noisy definitions, it has, as others have noted, typically become parameter-heavy; the case for any ill-defined problem. >Maybe it's just me (in which case I apologise >and I'll go back to not reading them) but if you are going to be >critical of anyone else's work or posts, take a good look at your own >first. Certainly. 1. Style based linking is an old idea. 2. Adding more semantics to CSS bloats the browser. 3. Bloating the browser may be a good tradeoff if authors are more productive or interoperability improves. The first is likely but the second is not. 4. Rational argument compares options first than proceeds. Otherwise hack as you will and increase the overall entropy while enriching the local language. It's a selfish behavior but (See Ayn Rand) a lot of progress can be made that way and a lot of progress is undone that way. len
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