Alan Kay wrote:
Or you could look at the actual problem "a web" has to solve, which is to present arbitrary information to a user that comes from any of several billion sources. Looked at from this perspective we can see that the current web design could hardly be more wrong headed. For example, what is the probability that we can make an authoring app that has all the features needed by billions of producers?
Hmmm.... let me take an opposing view here, at least for the purpose of playing devil's advocate:
1. Paper and ink have served for 1000s of years, and with the addition of the printing press and libraries have served to distribute and preserve information, from several billion sources, for an awfully long time.
2. If one actually looks at what people use when generating and distributing information it tends to be essentially "smarter paper" - word processors, spreadsheets, powerpoint slides; and when we look at distribution systems, it comes down to email and the electronic equivalent of file rooms and libraries.
Sure, we've added additional media types to the mix, but the basic model hasn't changed all that much. Pretty much all the more complicated technologies people have come up with don't actually work that well, or get used that much. Even in the web world, single direction hyperlinks dominate (remember all the complicated, bi-directional links that Ted Nelson came up with). And when it comes to "groupware," what dominates seems to be chat and twitter.
There's a pretty good argument to be made that what "works" are powerful building blocks that can be combined in lots of different ways; driven by some degree of natural selection and evolution. (Where the web is concerned, first there was ftp, then techinfo, then gopher, and now the web. Simple mashups seem to have won out over more complicated service oriented architectures. We might well have plateaued.)
Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
