No, its definition.
And as far as your SQL analogy, it's very much what I'm saying that (despite the ability to use frames to assemble a pseudo-document), there is the 'JOIN' syntax in HTTP or even Wiki...
people arrange their HTML pages as paragraphs of text because that's the most effective way of presentation. They don't do it because they're forced to, they do it because they want to
Then why, when I'm freed from the constraints of the tools and face-to-face with a colleague do I stop trying to force ideas into a linear narrative and start drawing and writing on diagrams?
Why are the worst 'in person' presentations the one where a tool is used to force a linear, paragraph-based discourse? And the best where - even though the spoken information might be forced to be linearised - a tool is used to elucidate non-linear, often non-hierarchical structure over this?
Many web sites are organized relationally, with internal links managed by treating CGI variables as table columns
Again, yes, we can try to (partially) force these things over the WWW model, but you see the misfit the moment you try to link to such a thing from outside...
I find its structure somewhat hierarchical, though.
Many thanks for the link. Indeed it is hierarchical (anything non-hierarchical tends to either be not represented, because it's not supported by the WWW tools, or relegated into a 'figure' interrupting the rightful linear flow of text, because that's what print does).
All the same, is indivisible linear order the way that you use that page? (A linear flow of paragraphs, within which all sentences have equal status and backwards linear dependencies.) I don't, I use the formatting to find and compare those parts of the information (within the page) that implicitly link together across the faked paragraph structure...
But the organisation that allowed me to do that was forced over the HTML structure with tables, and is not first class. There's no way that I can refer to the basic definitions within that page in the WWW scheme...
Christ Almighty, try to understand the greater meaning of my point rather than fixating on the literal meaning of my specific choice of words.
Christ Almighty try to see the mismatch with the WWW!
In re-defining page down to the sentences across which I scan hopping from structure to sructure down what I (very naively, obviously!) call a page, you miss the fact that these things are not individually accessed via HTTP and assembled, the whole thing (let's call it an HTML document, if you want to redefine the semantics of page) is one from the point of view of hyperlinking (save for anchors, which are completely inadequate).
I know you're trying to get me to concede that at some level I need to read word by word, which I have no problem doing, but you're missing the context of this entire discussion...
OK, fine. We might (for the most part) read a sentence word to word (in fact we don't, if you look at experiments on eyeball tracking by psychologists, but let's ignore that). We might also (for the most part) read a paragraph sentence by sentence (same objection).
All the same, not all pages are arranged as series of paragraphs. HTML tries to force this, but non-linear paragraphs/sentence in (what the paper bound would like us to call) diagrams are just as communicative in some situations.
Furthermore there are repetitious structures across hierarchies (violating paragraph structures) that we can bring out in many graphical ways. The dictionary was my example - I might want to read the basic definitions only, and not the historical usages. (In fact, I'd be happy to label anyone who reads the whole page in a good dictionary from the first line linearly forward to the last a freak!)
Now we can force this over HTML (using tables), but how can I refer to those parts of such a document? I can't... because a document is strictly a series of paragraph - that's the only way we could possibly understand it, right?
It's a very amusing little example you think you have for linear order, but it no more relates to the argument about hierarchical document structure than does the linearity of house numbers down a street relate to any presumed necessity of order on their telephone numbers!
Summarizing and quoting from an article such as this one is fair use
Yes, I agree - this is all I thought when submitting, then I was made nervous when I realised that the Slashdot 'editors' had just mashed the long quote onto the end of the summary so that this was far less clear, and looked like my summary was merely cutting-and-pasting a whole swathe from Nelson's piece...
No, but I *do* start at the beginning of a paragraph
And there we have it... what else could there be but pages as a series of continuous paragraphs, made up of sentences, made up of words, and only linear and decomposition relationships between them?
As I say on a separate branch (we're stuck in a hierarchy, of course, but thankfully false pages are grafted over so I can hyperlink... even so two threads are liable to still continue and diverge with only that point of contact), a page from the OED is a good contrary example (I'd screenshot one as an example, but it's protected by copyright and chargable, of course).
(You notice as well how, whenever I use brackets in this post I would really like to make an aside, but this web interface doesn't even give me all the features of text - like footnotes - and nor does it replace them with something better...)
Being British, I know both the Queen (Liz) and Tony on a personal basis, and I can tell you, they know nothing about electronical document schemes pre-WWW...;)
When you find the page you're looking for in the encyclopedia or on the web, you stop dealing with indices and hyperlinks, and start reading linearly
A page from the OED is a great contrary example - have a look...
I don't find a page, then read the whole thing from the first line - there are all kinds of cues (font, font size, colour, indentation) to the ability to read across a document, rather than linearly through it. I go back and forth over these structures within a page, not just to get there.
Unfortunately little of this is directly supported (and certainly not developed) by HTML, where all structure is forced into a hierarchy (or ordered paragraphs and lists) and the only relation with the outside world is via anchors!
I didn't mean to imply that you didn't know that he'd been advocating these ideas for years, rather to say that the fact that they don't sound so novel anymore is a measure of some degree of success. More of his ideas have been accepted or adapted than were hacked into the WWW, that's for sure.
As far as having to fight his own corner for years, that in itself doesn't make him wrong. How long did Einstein (or Heisenberg) have to defend their ideas before they could show them part of the world (let alone practically useful)?
The only part of that he mentioned that makes any sense at all was when he mentioned version control. We already have the tools for that - Subversion or CVS can be integrated in our documentation systems to handle real version control in XML documents.
Externally. There is no version and authoring information in the WWW model, hence things built over it like Wikipedia have to provide proprietary islands of provenance.
When you try to persuade other people of your ideas, you normally try to explain what's so great and keep your personal problems, rants and unhappyness to yourself.
Agreed. And he doesn't have the perspective of a balanced person. For instance, he rants against Wired, but I for one would not have even heard of Ted Nelson, and done my own research into his ideas, if it wasn't for Wired.
I can tell you why Xanadu won't take off: Mr. Nelson isn't humble enough. "Oh yes, I invented this and that"
*Cough* Tim Berners-Lee *cough* The Semantic Web won't fly or sink (am I mixing metaphors?) based on ego...
Either that, or it's simply a difficult problem that couldn't be designed into WWW from the start because there was no good solution
In those terms (cross-document) searching is a difficult problem that wasn't designed into WWW from the start. Google's server farm isn't the pretty (or always acknowledged) part of the web's arhitecture, but it's necessary...
Written text has the very interesting property of linearity, which matches it to the linear processing of spoken discourse, for which we have hardwired functions in brain. How could you "improve" on that?
When you need something from an encyclopedia, do you start at p1, respecting the 'order in which it would be spoken'?
Even allowing skipping, if you find that one concept leads to another, do you only skip on to that if it respects the linear order (i.e. comes alphabetically later)?
When you start to read the WWW, do you start with TBL's original pages?
No, hypertext is something different... so why should this only apply (inadequately) between documents, and not within them?
Hierarchy is a form of organization [...] Organization is a necessary tool for logical thinking.
Hierarchy is one form of organisation. People have become as blind to document structure as they have to database structure - that good efficient DBMS implementations of the relational model made headway in the 1970s doesn't mean that the relational model is the only way to organise data. What about... say... hierarchy!
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, wait, that's what I did!
Why are the worst 'in person' presentations the one where a tool is used to force a linear, paragraph-based discourse? And the best where - even though the spoken information might be forced to be linearised - a tool is used to elucidate non-linear, often non-hierarchical structure over this?
All the same, is indivisible linear order the way that you use that page? (A linear flow of paragraphs, within which all sentences have equal status and backwards linear dependencies.) I don't, I use the formatting to find and compare those parts of the information (within the page) that implicitly link together across the faked paragraph structure...
But the organisation that allowed me to do that was forced over the HTML structure with tables, and is not first class. There's no way that I can refer to the basic definitions within that page in the WWW scheme...
In re-defining page down to the sentences across which I scan hopping from structure to sructure down what I (very naively, obviously!) call a page, you miss the fact that these things are not individually accessed via HTTP and assembled, the whole thing (let's call it an HTML document, if you want to redefine the semantics of page) is one from the point of view of hyperlinking (save for anchors, which are completely inadequate).
I know you're trying to get me to concede that at some level I need to read word by word, which I have no problem doing, but you're missing the context of this entire discussion...
All the same, not all pages are arranged as series of paragraphs. HTML tries to force this, but non-linear paragraphs/sentence in (what the paper bound would like us to call) diagrams are just as communicative in some situations.
Furthermore there are repetitious structures across hierarchies (violating paragraph structures) that we can bring out in many graphical ways. The dictionary was my example - I might want to read the basic definitions only, and not the historical usages. (In fact, I'd be happy to label anyone who reads the whole page in a good dictionary from the first line linearly forward to the last a freak!)
Now we can force this over HTML (using tables), but how can I refer to those parts of such a document? I can't... because a document is strictly a series of paragraph - that's the only way we could possibly understand it, right?
It's a very amusing little example you think you have for linear order, but it no more relates to the argument about hierarchical document structure than does the linearity of house numbers down a street relate to any presumed necessity of order on their telephone numbers!
Someone else actually using hyperlinking within the pseudo-document structure of the forced-hierarchical discussion :)
Seriously, you need to be modded more up in this discussion but obviously I can't do so...
Page = sentence, does it? I really suggest you visit the dictionary...
As I say on a separate branch (we're stuck in a hierarchy, of course, but thankfully false pages are grafted over so I can hyperlink... even so two threads are liable to still continue and diverge with only that point of contact), a page from the OED is a good contrary example (I'd screenshot one as an example, but it's protected by copyright and chargable, of course).
(You notice as well how, whenever I use brackets in this post I would really like to make an aside, but this web interface doesn't even give me all the features of text - like footnotes - and nor does it replace them with something better...)
Being British, I know both the Queen (Liz) and Tony on a personal basis, and I can tell you, they know nothing about electronical document schemes pre-WWW... ;)
I don't find a page, then read the whole thing from the first line - there are all kinds of cues (font, font size, colour, indentation) to the ability to read across a document, rather than linearly through it. I go back and forth over these structures within a page, not just to get there.
Unfortunately little of this is directly supported (and certainly not developed) by HTML, where all structure is forced into a hierarchy (or ordered paragraphs and lists) and the only relation with the outside world is via anchors!
As far as having to fight his own corner for years, that in itself doesn't make him wrong. How long did Einstein (or Heisenberg) have to defend their ideas before they could show them part of the world (let alone practically useful)?
Even allowing skipping, if you find that one concept leads to another, do you only skip on to that if it respects the linear order (i.e. comes alphabetically later)?
When you start to read the WWW, do you start with TBL's original pages?
No, hypertext is something different... so why should this only apply (inadequately) between documents, and not within them?