- From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) <clbullar@ingr.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 10:09:38 -0500
- To: 'Sandro Hawke' <sandro@w3.org>
- Cc: 'Tim Berners-Lee' <timbl@w3.org>, "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@apache.org>, "Ian B. Jacobs" <ij@w3.org>, www-tag@w3.org
Navigable? Addressable. Better for me because that gets me navigable. I am not uncomfortable with 'address space' because by convention I have come to associate it with 'scope'. I think the reason 'information space' makes me pale is that it seems to wed the content to the system that hosts it, and that is something, at least in markup, one tries to avoid although in practice, it isn't completely possible because names are content even if syntax is not. The web definitions work for most people precisely because the web is a system in which some names (URIs) and addresses are the same, therefore, a certain percentage of the content IS systemic, thus the opacity of URI debates. One shouldn't, but one knows one can peek. The arch doc can't dance around the fact of URIness as both name and address in practice. It possibly should be quite explicit that this is the base concept of the web as a system. At the very least, I hope a glossary of the important nouns is added to the Arch Doc. That should patch some of the conceptual leakage. len -----Original Message----- From: Sandro Hawke [mailto:sandro@w3.org] > "Information space" still has a mystical incantation > kind of feel. +1 Google does not suggest it's a well-understood term. For instance, we have Clay Shirky saying, in a class syllabus for "Thinking about Networks": Week 4. Visualizing Networks I What is "information space"? How can you visualize an N-dimensional network in 2D space? 3D space? What visual tools and techniques are there for representing networks? -- http://stage.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~cs97/tan/#classes I don't know what Dr. Shirky thinks "information space" is, but the fact that he puts scare quotes around it, and covers it under visualization, suggests he's using it differently from the TAG. When last I visitted this topic, I came up with an informal definition... The idea of an information space is that information can be collected into units, and these units can be arranged to somehow be navigable. -- http://www.w3.org/2002/11/webarch4/v3.html ... but without such a definition, I think using the term does more harm than good. -- sandro
Received on Wednesday, 24 September 2003 11:10:03 UTC