Arthur> Just one correction. Tim Berners-Lee is credited with
Arthur> inventing the World Wide Web. He deserves to be recognized as
Arthur> some sort great humanas he did this and seemed to have sought
Arthur> no monetary outcome such as trying to patent or copyright
Arthur> anything.
Keith> True enough. However, it's to be wondered whether he had any
Keith> idea of just how his innovation would be developed. Initially
Keith> it was just a useful mode of communication for scientific
Keith> results.
The concept of hypertext/hypermedia has been around for nearly 50
years. Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu envisioned something greater, in a
sense, that the WWWeb as we now know it. Nor were such notions limited
to the arcana of the academic hothouse; both the depths and the
intrinsic ambiguities of such computer systems appear n John Barth's
_Giles Goat-Boy_. (1966)
Tim Berniers-Lee designed a protocol piggy-backing on the existing
internet, that implemented a prcatical and simple subset of what
Nelson, inter alia, had been talking about for years. TB-L's design
was so simple that any modestly computer-literate person could learn
and start employing it with a few evenings of study and practice.
What the Tim's original protocol didn't envision was the rabid
determination of advertisers and marketing droids to exploit the web
in the same was as they had learned and loved to exploit print media
and TV. Missing from Tim's initial design were control of detailed
page layout and details of audio/video streaming. Support for
unlimited interactive sessions were intentionally omitted from HTTP in
order to reduce load on 90s-era servers and bandwidth.
Which brings me to some thougths about which I hadn't yet posted here:
The rabid weasels of marketing have been furioso drivers in adding
"cascading style sheets" (detailed page layout control) and the
embedding of video (aka TV :-) and client-side scripting to the basic
HTTP/HTML protocols. The result is that many web sites -- especially
corporate sites -- are becoming indistinguishable from television and
the worst of print media, notwithstanding that they're interactive.
nudel% calc
RPN Calculator: v. 1.9, mds -- Sun 10 Aug 2008
(h for help, q to quit) Output to 3 sig. figs, Trig: angles in
radians
calc> 151
calc> 11
calc> /
13.727
calc> 11
calc> 14
calc> *
154
calc> 1859
calc> +
2013
calc> q
nudel% which pdftotext
/usr/X11R6/bin/pdftotext
nudel% cd /tmp
nudel% ls
MO4C4316190010C99 facebook.html porcupines.pdf
ding.wav* lj*
rodent-helminthes.pdf
nudel% pdftotext MO* CHIN
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