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1. 1 On February 26th, 2024, phaTTboi said:

   I just read the free intro Weinberger posted, and while his points have some interest, I still get the feeling that the whole Wide Web of the World is slowly sinking under its own weight. No matter, I’ve had this feeling since 1997, and I used to discuss some of the issues of navigation in a chaotic information space such as the Web with great interest and vigor in public forums, but few people were interested back then, and I suspect that Joe Sixpack cares much more, even today. Most people seem to accept an increasing reliance in their lives on a fractious, poorly organized and very fluid Web as a commonplace of modern life, and put up with Web site operators doing whatever they damn well please, whenever they please, with equanimity. No one really expects the Web to work well anymore, and a measure of that is the fact the Google’s “I Feel Lucky” button is still a feature of the worlds most widely hit Web page…

   Classification of knowledge is pretty meaningless, and even pointless, if the structure of the knowledge classified is constantly shifting, as it does in the Web. Back before Berners-Lee was leading the world over his lightweight http cliff, Ted Nelson was burning through several hundred million dollars of Autodesk money, trying to get the Xanadu project up and running, unsucessfully. A lot of the problem with Xanadu was Ted himself, but it did have useful ideas, which I still think are going to be essential to any real implementation of a semantic Web.

   The first Xanadu concept people still walk by without much comment is the concept of hyperlinks being bi-directional. In other words, hyperlinks in Xanadu are permanent reletionships between content nodes, which contain enough metadata to enforce referential integrity, including, at a minimum, versioning and copyright. But this could, and probably should, be easily extended by expansion of a metadata schema in any system that wants to make human tagging have lasting value. As it is in the actual Web today, effort that people put into developing metadata for sites they don’t control has no guarantee of being useful to anyone, beyond the promise of the underlying Web site operator to support such metadata efforts, by not re-organizing or changing tagged content.

   By contrast, busted links in Xanadu are system integrity violations, and they can be handled systemically (at least in theory), thereby preserving the value of additional metadata built over link relationships. That has huge social value, for folks interested in Weinberger’s folksonomies, but it is certianly no feature of any Web based hypertext proposals I’ve heard about.

   The second thing I personally liked about Xanadu was it’s idea of deep control of versions, and the preservation of versioning in all documents. Initially, this was something that doomed Xanadu on a large scale, but with the falling cost of massive storage, versioning is a way of making a rapidly growing and changing Web make at least some kind of quasi-permanent sense to creators of metadata tag stores. Versioning is way beyond a simple system like http, and isn’t contemplated in any semantic Web proposals I’ve seen. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it with “new and improved” Web sites and their dingbat designers, who have a lot of damned chutzpah and seemingly little sense as they go around applying their visual cliche-of-the-month to sites I frequently visit. I come to understand such sites in a certian way, and dropping by to find redesigned pages always hacks me off, as it frequently imposes upon me, the user, a burden of figuring out all over again how to get to the content I want, through the sensibilities of whatever the last dingbat Web designer left. Much better if I could count on the persistence and function of older versions until I have time to look around the hot new flavor of the month and decide if it has any benefit to me.

   But I really think that for all practical purposes, efforts to “fix” the World Wide Web are doomed, and a big waste of time and resources. For better or worse, the train to WWW chaos left the station long ago, and has its own momentum. Those interested in “fixing” it would better spend their efforts in building something better along side of it, and making it easy and painless to port content into the improved information space. That’s what the Web did to gopher, and it makes sense to me that the same fate befall the Web.

2. 2 On March 1st, 2024, sig said:

   “Without trees, how will we organize… business org charts…?”, I love that. Perhaps organizing organization charts is a tad over the top? Like modelling a model of a model?

   Treetype: Two dimensional - employee defined per department and title. Very restrictive when choosing the right ‘resource’ for a job / task.
   Extended treetype / grid (hey, those consultants have to make a living): Three dimensional - department, title and speciality. Slightly better when choosing the right person.
   Then the org. chart model grinds to a halt.

   Fuhgettabout the tree, the whole notion of org. charts. Use, say tags and there are no limits to the dimensions.
   Then you organize the real thing (an employee say) directly, not the organization. Not modelling a model…

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