Re: <resouce>, links, and addresses [was: W3C and Handle technology ]

At 01:15 AM 9/3/96 -0400, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
>Hmmm... my working definition of "first class" is "addressable."  If
>the <resource> element above had an ID=xyz attribute, and it were in
>some document whose address was ABC, then I can see that you could
>call it a first class link, since its address would be ABC#xyz.

Right, whereas current Web links are not their own elements, so you can't
give them an ID. The address (HREF) and the content share the same element.

>The question in my mind is: should it work like C, where
>the amount of indirection is specified at the source (*p vs **p vs...)
>or HyTime, where the indirection is specified at the destinatio
>(i.e. if A->B is a link and B is marked specially, link traversal
>continues through B to C, and if that's marked special, ...)

I would say the latter, like HyTime. If someone on the web links _to_ my
page, and I want to move my page, I should be able to do so and leave a
redirect in the old link's place. I can't think of a situation where the
link source author would want to do something different than what the link
destination author intended.

>>I suppose that's true. But in practice, the cost of internic registration of
>>a domain name means that "small players" (usually individuals) are
>>restricted to their service provider's domain name. As long as domain names
>>cost money, there should be some way of having URLs that are independant of
>>domain names. Anyhow, that's Star Trekish stuff. It probably won't get
>>solved in the short run.
>
>[Here we go again. This is "the URN myth"]
>
>It won't get solved because it's not a technical problem. It's an
>intrinsic property of names: they're valuable, and therefore they're
>likely to cost money. They also require maintenance, or they
>lose their value.

I understand all that. What I'm saying is that I should be able to move a
_part_ of my namespace indpendant of the rest, so that

http://www.paul.com/foo

would be on a completely different machine from

http://www.paul.com/bar

In other words, the "domain name" would be demoted to just a part of the
string, and browsers would use the whole string to resolve the document. As
I said, I think that that is a long way off because it would be rather
expensive to do these types of lookups.

>> and should have
>>their own activity pages.
>
>Only if there's something to say/do about linking. I suspect
>there is, but I dunno.

Well, there are the RESOURCE based redirects that we discussed. 
There is the under-implemented <LINK>. 
There are the over-implemented frames (which should be specified as a form
of linking). 
There are eventually going to be results from the linking component of the
SGML ERB.

Maybe a linking activity page would encourage us to think of ways to
coordinate all of those activities and come up with something coherent and
likely to be implemented. For instance we could combine frame, <LINK> and
<OBJECT> in a way that would allow intelligent 

        bookmarking
        large document printing (i.e. documents composed of multiple HTML
files) 
        document transclusion
        better navigational controls

 Paul Prescod

Received on Thursday, 5 September 1996 13:09:05 UTC