Re: Hypertext; for machine or humans?

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/ Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org> was heard to say:
| On Sun, Sep 29, 2002 at 04:01:41PM -0400, Norman Walsh wrote:
|> Here anyway is an attempt at a practical definition:
|> 
|> 1. A hypertext references is a reference to something that if traversed
|>    will be displayed to a human reader. (So references to stylesheets
|>    and script libraries are not hypertext references.)
|
| Hmm, I'm not sure what purpose a human/machine distinction serves here.
| To me, that's a property of the data you get back when resolving the
| URI, not of the URI itself or to what it refers.

I don't think so. I think at the language semantics level, the context
where the link occurs (trivially, the element it occurs on, but I'm
sure there are languages where containment and perhaps other factors
apply) determines what a dereference is supposed to mean.

| So, a GET on a URI that identifies a stylesheet doesn't necessarily
| return the stylesheet; it could return an HTML page saying "This is a
| stylesheet for such-and-such".

Yeah, but if the user agent did the GET to obtain a stylesheet, it
isn't likely to display that HTML page to the user, more likely it's
going to attempt to interpret it as a stylesheet and fail more or
less.

Similarly, if the user did a GET to obtain a page to display, it's
going to display that page even if it gets back a stylesheet.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | To create a little flower is the labour of
XML Standards Architect | ages.--Blake
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | 
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Received on Monday, 30 September 2002 10:14:56 UTC