Re: Web trends

Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Message-id: <9309071744.AA23360@austin.BSDI.COM>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Web trends 
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 07 Sep 93 13:03:01 EDT.
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Reply-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 1993 12:44:31 -0500
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>
Status: RO
> Devil's advocate: maybe terminal documents are a good thing.  In
...
> A few months ago, the Merit Network mounted a Gopher for the
> Chronicle of Higher Ed, a US publication that's followed closely
> in academe.  This Gopher server is the first I've found with zero
> outside links.  It stands on its own.
...
> I find this very appealing.  If other single-topic servers followed
> the same model, we could end up with a division of labor, where some
> servers have a goal of providing unique documents, and others have
> the goal of organizing Gopher documents within a subject area, and
> others have the goal of organizing the subject Gophers.

I have no argument with this approach, in fact, this is the way it's
*supposed* to work.  What is missing is the ability for users to be able
to easily augment this structure by adding links to the Chronicle of Higher
Ed from organizing documents that the Merit Network people may have no
clue exists.  I'm not coming out of left field here, this is how hypertext
is designed to work.  All we are missing is the implementation (the
LINK command is in the spec for doing just this).

The current solution is to send lots of email around by hand which
is suboptimal (considering that you can't find the owners of a lot
of documents).  Annotations do not solve this problem either.

--sanders