Put that together with Gurstein's China article and a pattern emerges. REH
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2010 12:15 PM To: [email protected]; [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Futurework] timesizing not downsizing 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 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
