my web, your web, The Web

While I was redrafting 2.2.1, it occured
to me that we should have, somewhere, something like:

[[side note about "The Web" and "one web". Just like
you can use Internet technologies to build a network
that's disconnected from the big-I Internet,
you can apply Web architecture to systems that
are disconnected from The Web.
Regardless, in any use of Web architecture,
there will be one Web, and one global scope.]]


Hmm... it might even be more subtle than that...
The Web, to me, right now, includes stuff
that I call
	file:/home/connolly/,syz.ps
that isn't 'reachable' by most of the rest
of you, but it also includes shared stuff
like w3.org, amazon, yahoo, etc.

A corporate intranet user's web probably
has a bunch of servers on the LAN plus
the general public web.

It's perhaps not an aside, but rather an important
feature of Web Architecture that each of us can
pretend that there's One Web... the fact that
the intranet guy can't dereference my postscript
file is in some formal/technical sense an
error or anomaly, but in practice, it doesn't
cost either of us any trouble at all.

The fact that the system as a whole hangs together
even though each of us tweaks it locally is a pretty
big feature, now that I think about it.

(of course, it's not novel to the Web. Internet
technologies all work like this.)


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Friday, 6 September 2002 17:34:51 UTC