- From: Fisher Mark <FisherM@is3.indy.tce.com>
- Date: Fri, 30 Aug 96 10:42:00 PDT
- To: WWW Annotation <www-annotation@w3.org>
Just some quick thoughts... Annotation is often most useful on material that scared (or "scary") webmasters don't want annotated. This makes forcing the annotation server to be a subservice of the Web server to be problematic at best. Since content selection (like PICS) and annotation are closely related services it might perhaps be better to look at having annotation service bureaus, like the label service bureaus of PICS. Although this does not guarantee that a user would always be able to retrieve the annotations for a given URL, it does decentralize annotation services, making them able to scale much better. Just as the World-Wide Web would not have been possible if the whole Web needed to be contained in a single server or set of servers, annotations cannot take off unless they mimic the web pages they annotate by having a distributed, transparent, and not-necessarily-fault-tolerant architecture. The big fault of the Dexter hypertext model is that it requires that all hypertext links can be reached at any time. This requires a centralized architecture that is incompatible both technically and politically with world-wide distributed systems like the Web and like annotations should be. Perhaps Tim Berners-Lee's greatest idea in creating the Web was that it was OK that a link might occasionally be down or could actually die off without crashing the Web. A similar principle should apply to annotations. ====================================================================== Mark Leighton Fisher Thomson Consumer Electronics fisherm@indy.tce.com Indianapolis, IN
Received on Friday, 30 August 1996 11:35:22 UTC