- From: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 22:08:18 -0400
- To: "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>
- Cc: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>, "public-awwsw@w3.org" <public-awwsw@w3.org>
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