Dude. Objects actually go away now when they're supposed
to. This is cool. Finally I won't have to restart the
server every time something screws up :)
Talked to my friend Reed for a long time last night about
the future of hypermedia. What the web could have really
used would be an <include> tag, that let you include bits of
HTML from other documents into your own, just like you can
inline offsite images. If you could nest documents in
documents in documents you could build incredible dynamic
even sort of organtic thing - more of a complex multilevel
expansive document space than a mere web page. Here's an
example: take oh, slashdot slashboxes, or netscape netcenter
channels. These are headline services. They get a feed
from these other sites, and reformat it and integrate it as
part of their own page. Now think of this: imagine if they
simply linked back to the originating site, and that site
could then paint inside the box whatever it liked? You can
still maintain a single cohesive web page, but the browser
is actually compositing many pieces of other sites together
into a single sort of digest.
By better laying out our hypermedia information, in
hierarchtical/hyperlinked structures, the browser can become
more of an intellegent agent. Power to the end user! The
internet right now is racing in two directions - one towards
more centralization, with portals and ASPs and backbones,
the other towards more decentralization, with gnutella and
freenet and their kin.
The problem, however, is how to balance the order (and
control) gained/afforded by centralization, vs the chaos
that is the current rather primitive crop of distributed
systems? The web does this supprisingly well, but only by
having multiple, redundant, _centralized_ indices of the
web. Distributed centralization. Gotta love it :) But the
web is also incredibly noninteractive, and that's really
bad. When people say they use the web "as an applications
platform" they really mean they're using HTTP to download
some ActiveX or Java controls. The idea of a web page as an
application only makes sense in the context of forms and
javascript - but these are not real-time technologies. A
dynamic hypermedia system needs to be able to respond to
changes in the system as they happen, and the web is
unsuited to this.
In case you hadn't guessed, the project I'm working (ADR) on has a lot
to do with this :)
Birthday yesterday (July 29th). I'm twenty now. No longer
a hotshot teenager. Damnit. Now I really have to do
something cool to stay ahead of the next generation :)
Left sputnik (my laptop, my desktop is named mir :-) plugged
into the wrong wall socket (it's on a switch, meant for a
lamp, which means you can turn it off) all night. Woke up
to find the battery completely flat. WHOOPS!