I used to deride web applications by saying we are trying to make DOCUMENTS behave like APPLICATIONS.
However, we should keep in mind that the explosion on the web also happened because of user generated content, and by that I don't mean just silly facebook comments. I mean blog posts, I mean photos, I mean content where the users are able to control the presentation. Or ideally, where users indicate semantic information.
This is what has made Web 2.0 great, if I may :)
And there is one language for this: HTML. It may not be perfect but what we are really talking about is an XML-like language to indicate semantics. It is ubiquitous.
So it's not just about hyperlinks. It is about structured data where you are able to embed the semantic information directly in the data. Sure, you could have the web based around JSON, for example. But why bother, when we already use brackets everywhere?
And once you start using those brackets, everything else follows.
> However, we should keep in mind that the explosion on the web also happened because of user generated content, and by that I don't mean just silly facebook comments.
"Document" in the sense that archivists and other information specialists use also applies equally to things like Facebook comments or random YouTube videos. Any discrete piece of content (and I'm not being rigorous with this definition) is a document and the purpose of the web is basically linking them together.
That these documents are often displayed simultaneously on the same webpage doesn't keep them from being separate documents.
However, we should keep in mind that the explosion on the web also happened because of user generated content, and by that I don't mean just silly facebook comments. I mean blog posts, I mean photos, I mean content where the users are able to control the presentation. Or ideally, where users indicate semantic information.
This is what has made Web 2.0 great, if I may :)
And there is one language for this: HTML. It may not be perfect but what we are really talking about is an XML-like language to indicate semantics. It is ubiquitous.
So it's not just about hyperlinks. It is about structured data where you are able to embed the semantic information directly in the data. Sure, you could have the web based around JSON, for example. But why bother, when we already use brackets everywhere?
And once you start using those brackets, everything else follows.
But we would do well if we had this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024164