Squeaking the Web

Roland Jesse jesse at prinz-atm.cs.Uni-Magdeburg.DE
Wed Aug 5 08:03:46 UTC 1998


Lex Spoon wrote:

>   2) Having other kinds of links is also quite useful!  It's a nice
> blend of structure and freedom.  Random links should definately stick
> around in a newer system.

What are these supposed to do? Can you elaborate that a bit further,
please?

> Thus the web today has less accessible
> information content than it could if all the flashy pages were cleaned 
> up.

IMHO it is not mutually exclusive to have both - some good and fancy
design and a wide accessibility (even to disabled people). The style
sheets as they are in the HTML 4.0 Specification
(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/) are a good step in the right direction.

There is not always a need to reinvent the wheel just to make this world
and its web a better place. ;-)

>   6) Surfing is possible.  People can end up reading things only
> tentatively related to where they started.  This is much like creative 
> thought in general....

You read Jay David Bolter's "Writing Space. The Computer, Hypertext, and
the History of Writing", did you? ;)

> Do links *really* need to be all that human readable?

Of course not. I do not have the source at hand right now, but Tim
Berners-Lee said once that when he designed the web he did not imagine
people writing HTML code by hand and having a need of nice and fancy URLs.
All this was supposed to be hidden information that a user does not need
to care about.

	Roland





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