Monday, 8 November 1999

Monday the 8th of November 1999

Here’s some words of wisdom. (Brings to mind Nielson and Derrida.) The language Nazis are always with us, loving our language to death. Sometimes I’m one.

Joke: I have a theory that no amount of humans in finite time could possibly come up with and collate and distribute the amount of jokes we receive daily. I think the internet is sentient (a la Clarke or King), and this is a manifestation of that fact.

Are these lone human responses to the complex system humanity has become? Are our thoughts and desires shaped by a smaller world that our backbrain remembers?

Some lessons on the World Wide Web

Ted Nelson is the putative father of hypertext, and hence the web. He never got his appropriately-named Xanadu system off the ground. Ted’s obssession seemed to be copyright (and micropayments, a fascination he shares with Jakob Nielson). Did he address the problem of addresses?

Dave’s laws of conventional business web addresses are as follows:

  1. Make it begin in www. and end in .com
  2. Make it easy to remember
  3. Make it obvious to spell
  4. Make it easy to type
  5. Buy as many mispellings of the address as you can
  6. Use it everywhere

These are a must if you want people to get to your web site. These are demands made partly by the current Domain Name System, but also by the way we’re wired. Disobey and you’ll be burnt.

These people advertise themselves variously as SiliconValley.com and SV.com. Massachusetts dub themselves the “dot commonwealth”. Asking for it.

But think of a good name. It’s taken.

The problem is that the DNS has flattened all trademarks into the one space, so there’s a lot of collisions between companies with common names like ‘Apple’ or ‘Prime’, making it hard. (I wonder if, in the future, people will want distinctive names, like Aknyra? What advances will we have to make to use such names?) The namespace is becoming increasingly unusable. Some people advocate alternative systems, such as using http://come.to/. I’m considering it myself, but can’t help that we’re sowing the seeds of destruction.

Jerry Scharf is right we need a better system. Maybe we should be sowing the seeds of destruction of the current system, so we can replace it. I’m not sure if a Bob and David’s simple directory is the trick (certainly the phone number suggestions seem regressive), but we certainly need more people advocating a new system. Tim Berners-Lee was right in the beginning, humans should never have to deal with addresses.

Surely we can do better than the phone system? Surely we shouldn’t have to be doing such low-level plumbing? Next year is the year 2000, damn it, the year we don’t have to take this kind of shit anymore. Repeat after me.

I mentioned Ted Nelson at the start of this note(?) because he proposed rich links between pages (forget about addresses, just think of the bindings between pages). In such a model I could potentially unobtrusively give referrer information in my links (i.e. the Wired link came from Robot Wisdom, and Bob’s link came from Dan Bricklin’s log (netfame: co-creator of VisiCalc) (and I’ll give you two guesses what their respective addresses are)).

I also mention Ted because he envisaged a pervasive system, one that wouldn’t suffer from linkrot (Jakob Nielson’s (IMHO good) word). He probably wouldn’t have approved of Wired maintaining multiple versions of their pages, or me linking to the For Printing version.

Just to link back to Ted’s favourite thought, check out the source code (more evil plumbing!) for the Experimenta page (they had their address on a pamphlet).

But this is all in the spirit of Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen’s web.

Citylink

Last night I watched a bit of the Sly Stallone movie ‘Daylight’. A tunnel with water pissing into it put me in mind of the southern tunnel of Transurban’s Citylink project.

Citylink tolling is like a folktale: it was supposed to have happened sometime in the past.

This sort of gross mismanagement is what you point to when people talk glowingly about the State of Jeff.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Republic

Everyone wanted the new laws to be perfect. Yet it comes out that so much of our Government is convention. Do things work better because detailed laws are written? Do we need more detailed laws concerning our government? Could things work just as well or better with looser laws? Can we avoid a litigation state, like America, whose paranoia we see every night reflected in shows like The Practice and Ally McBeal?

So much of our government is based on individuals. If a member dies or retires, a by-election must be held, they can’t simply be replaced by their party. So why does our government orbit around the two party system? Could we have more than two major parties? Could we have no dominant parties?

What stops two parties from remaining forever? (Not just here, but in America and Britain, or elsewhere, too.)

A few notes on XML

Everyone’s talking about XML. This is confusing. Does everyone talk about SGML? No, they talk about HTML. Do we use a content-type of text/sgml? No, we use text/html. So why should we use text/xml? People’re seduced and people’re confused.

Don’t tell people that XML is a language, it confuses them. Tell them XML is a set of rules for creating a markup language.

And XML can’t do everything! I can’t even do sets in XML, for instance:

<set1> a b c <set2> d e f </set1> g h i </set2>

XML does promise to be good set of rules for producing some very useful languages. One thing it will do (hopefully) is bring the web closer to Ted’s Xanadu. Smarter linking, smarter pages.

Bookmarklets

Why wait? Smarter linking and pages can be achieved with script today. Robot Wisdom pointed me to the wonderful idea of Bookmarklets. You can have a link to a search engine that pops up a little box for keywords. You can have a daily surfing link that pops up ten windows to your favourite sites.

So a small correction is in order for my rant(?) on browsers. Lets be proactive. No new addressing system for browsers. We don’t like frames, lets be rid of them. It is common practice for commercial sites to have a Bookmark Me link. They could also supply two pieces of javascript, one behind the link to generate a URL like suggested yesterday, and one in a frameset that will parse the query string of a URL and populate itself with the appropriate frames.

Aus Musos

Andrew Bowie is an exemplar of those net people who liked something and, instead of creating the definitive link page to resources on that topic (next Tuesday), has gone and created an excellent resource on that topic. Check out Preshrunk (warning: frames). Typical of his kind, he’s created a much better home on the web for this band than their official page.

Andrew also takes care of Under the Covers (warning: frames), a covers and live Faith No More site.