a comment about paper

Misha: 
 I browsed your paper.

 YOu might be interested in PICS, a w3 offering as a standard
rating system for all internet resources. There is a problem with
this(or with any system that attempts to RATE anything). Beauty
is in the eye of the beholder; suitability is very context specific.

 Also, the scaling of large annotation systems into the already
crowded internet is problematic. Some solutions have been
suggested for improving the performance of HTTP (http 1.1 being
one). There can be no ONE POINT for housing all the public comments
about a given resource.

 In one way, standalone comments about a particular site are a simpler
version of annotations. in general, an annotation will carry with it
a collection of hooks that have to be dropped into a particular
version of a target resource. This is a much more complex issue
than simply grafting annotation to the end of a given resource.
The second scenario works well when the host resource changes...
the parasitic annotation can still live along with it. 

 Another missing piece of the puzzle is... what if the underlying (host)
resource changes after a set of (parasitic) annotations have been applied 
to it... and what if the changes are so drastic that the context of the
original annotations are lost. Obviously it is the right of anyone
to change any URL response at any time (or is it???), but wouldn't
you like to be able to keep your snarky comments in line with the 
host resource? This is screaming for some sort of notification
system which has knowledge of the web of annotations and the 
responsible authorities for each one. 

That's probably only worth about half a cent.
les cuff
nf.ca

Received on Monday, 29 July 1996 11:25:47 UTC