Re: Richer & richer semantics?

At 10:15 AM 12/21/96 -0800, Terry Allen wrote:
>Tim Bray writes:
>
>>Hell, I want general transclusion a la Xanadu...
>          
>which is another linking behaviour that the Web already has,
>perhaps unfortunately.
>
>For years now (that's eons in Web time) I've been complaining
>that involuntary transclusion works against the interests of
>copyright holders and dramatically reduces their desire to
>make copyrighted material available inthe Web environment.

If involuntary transclusion is not done on the client side it can be done on
the server side. On the current Web, the alternative is to download other
people's data. On a future web, the web server will probably do server-side
transclusion *for you*. It is probably in the copyright holder's best
interest to have it be done on the client, because at least they have a
mechanism for communicating directly to the reader. So I would argue that we
should put it in the XML standard.

The only solution seems to be servers who ask: "who are you, why do you want
this and under what conditions do you want it?" 

>IMG was bad enough (from this angle); FRAMEs are dreadful
>(from this angle).  I don't see any simple solution, and maybe
>linking is not the arena in which a solution should be sought.

I think that it requires usage-negotiation in the transport protocols, and
is not a linking issue.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Saturday, 21 December 1996 19:51:35 UTC