Re: REL and REV attributes (Was: More comments on HTML 3.0)

Craig Hubley (craig@passport.ca)
Thu, 27 Apr 95 23:14:12 EDT

> On Thu, 27 Apr 1995, Craig Hubley wrote:
> > ...
> > 'contains' links to build the hierarchy (although all the links were shown).
> > In the long run the 'contains' links (which forced users to put documents
> > in a 'folder') were abandoned and cited as the single biggest pain by authors.
> > But so much add on software lazily looked for 'contains' instead of author-
> > specified organizing criteria that effectively the 'contains' stuck hard...
>
> One bad implementation doesn't negate the concept.

This was not an implementation problem. The concept itself was at fault.
The old-fashioned idea that some kind of tree/hierarchy with standard
names for top/next/last/up/down had to exist in the document, was at fault.

Tool implementors, less experienced with hypertext than the tool *users*,
built heavily on the idea of hierarchy. I see the same trend in this recent
discussion, with a longer and longer list of assumed-relationships that are
less and less guaranteed to apply to hypertext documents, and don't care to
see the mistake repeated.

-- 
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