Content no more

Is The Web Still The Web?

Linked by David Adams on Sat 5th Jul 2008 04:57 UTC, submitted by snydeq

Neil McAllister raises questions regarding the Web now that it no longer resembles Tim Berners-Lee's early vision: Is the Web still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? If the content can't be indexed and searched? If you can't view source? In other words, McAllister writes, if today's RIAs no longer resemble the 'Web,' then should we be shoehorning them into the Web's infrastructure, or is the problem that the client platforms simply aren't evolving fast enough to meet our needs.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Woven threads

If we look at the original meaning of network, we find that it refers to a fabric of twisted or woven threads that have spaces in them, as would a net.

Those threads and open spaces are an apt metaphor for hypertext where all spaces are connected, linked, and no space is any more important than another.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/
See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

What happens

The principal problem one has to face is the unobservability of the processes going on in the Net.

The only way to observe interactions with a certain home page or server is the amount of electronic mail, the count of log-ins into a certain page or the number of subscribers to a e-magazine or a discussion group. So we can only talk in a highly selective perspective which depends on where we are located, when we look into the Net and how, about the actual structure of the Internet as accessable to a certain observer at a certain moment.

• Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/
• 
  
• See that post with different algorithms in metabole
• 
  
• See the journal French Metablog with today different posts
• 
  
• Enter Hypertextual as a member