Re: defining mediator

On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Jon Garfunkel wrote:
> At 11:25 AM 8/27/1999 -0700, ping@lfw.org wrote:
> >So, the term for Crit is a "remote mediator".  The term for what you
> >are talking about is a "local mediator".
> 
> I like that.

Good.  Thanks.  :)  Some corrections though:

> - The ThirdVoice mediator is a plug-in, so it's local.

ThirdVoice is not a mediator because it doesn't actually chew
up the document and produce a new document.  It just has its
own code for displaying the annotations when the browser renders
the document.

> - HyperNews, Slashdot, PageSeeder, the mediator is on the (remote) server
> which has the mark document and the related annotations. Call it
> "integrated" ??

These things also aren't mediators, for the opposite reason:
there is no web page that they are taking as input to produce
the result.  That is, you can't use HyperNews or Slashdot to mark
up an arbitrary public website, for example.  If i understand
correctly, PageSeeder is not a mediator either, because you as
the server administrator have to go and manually put the seed
tags in the page yourself; no one is generating them for you.

A mediator is a real-time converter: it takes a web page as input
and produces a web page as output.  (Strictly speaking, a mediator
can and should, for performance reasons, work on an input *stream*
which it incrementally parses, and produce an output stream.)

> Oh, and BTW, the "mark document" is my term for "the document which
> comments have been made upon." I'm just borrowing the term from con-artist
> jargon (where the "mark" is the guy who's gonna get conned), it seems to
> sound right.

May i again propose some terminology from CritLink?  We call
such a document the "target document" of the annotation.
(Where "we" is, roughly, myself and the people who have been
at the design meetings for Crit.)

This is nicely harmonious with the link terminology that we
use.  In the Crit way of doing things, an annotation is just
a document linked to the target document.  We call the two
ends of the link the "source" (in the annotation) and the
"target" (in the target document).



-- ?!ng

Received on Sunday, 29 August 1999 02:29:59 UTC