Re: On intentions of Naming Authorities and Referers

Catching up on some mail ;-)

On Apr 4, 2008, at 5:31 AM, Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol) wrote:

>>> The GOFHTW (good old-fashioned hypertext-web) has thrived largely
>>> without naming authorities giving explicit expression to their
>>> intentions. Often (leaf-delegated) naming authorities do not even
>>> realise that they were acting in such a role ("I just put this
>>> document on the web") or that they have or had any obligation to
>>> make explicit statements about what they have published - indeed in
>>> general there has been no such obligation on the GOFHTW.
>>>
>>> The GOFHTW has evolved and been 'successful' without requiring such
>>> expression... why is that?
>>
>> Excellent question. I would say:
>>   - because it is used by people, not by automated agents, and  
>> people are forgiving

This would be #1 for me. Machines have little intuition. Currently,  
even writing a web spider can be somewhat complicated when there are  
cookies and forms involved. That sort of difficulty - even traversing  
the GOFHTW trying to just have a machine "see" each page is a  
foreshadow of the difficulties one might have when trying to do  
something a bit more complicated.

Here's another way to look at it: What would it take to have there be  
no "deep web", if much more of  the web was shallow in the sense that  
a machine could traverse it, absorb it, and usefully present and use  
its content on our behalf.

-Alan

>>
>>   - broken links are usually quickly repaired because web sites  
>> (unlike libraries) are 'live'
>>   - most assertions have "href" as the verb, which is so sloppy  
>> that it's difficult to be wrong
>>   - because of its low expected semantic service level (librarians  
>> don't use URIs)
>
> I think I'd add that many 'web documents' are also self-referential/ 
> self-describing at least in a narrative sense (eg. std boiler plates  
> and SOTD sections in W3C publication) and sometime is a structured  
> sense (such that automated agens can conclude some things about a  
> document).

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2008 02:09:02 UTC