Re: keyword tag, REL, REV, TYPE, INDEX....

lee@sq.com
Tue, 2 May 95 12:45:58 EDT

I want to agree with Ian Graham, <igraham@utirc.utoronto.ca>,

> This discussion seems to have several HEAD issues running in parallel, and
> disagreements seem to be arising because we are looking for different things
> in the same place.

A few of us have agree to draft an initial proposal, and we'll start out
with Scope and Requirements. Perhaps that will help to focus discussion
without limiting it.

> 2. Complex LINK relationships. Several examples have appeared, such
> as REL = "Join(Glossary,Author)"

My first thought when I saw this again in your mail was HyQ.
After I recovered, I perceived, as though in a blinding vision of golden
wood-pigeons, that putting HyQ in an internet draft is not in fact very
appropriate.

Allowing complex relationships sounds sensible. Requiring that an
implementation do something with them does not.

I've been imagining that we say that an attribute value starting with
an X is user-defined, for example, as for mail headers.

Then you could do
REL = "Xsequel: join(Glossary,Author) where docid = $URL.id"
in your own documents if you wanted, and even have s/w that supported it.

> 3. Object Model

Well, Alan Kay might say that you are on the right track :-), and that
docuemnts are really objects that know how to present themselves and
be read. Well, I wasn't convinced, so I shouldn't try and misrepresent
him... however, perhaps there might be a tie-in with technology like Java,
and maybe REL or REV could be used to specify a relationship implemented by
a Java script that applied to multiple pages.

> posted by Steven Fought. The problem of course is -- which object
> model (foundation class....) do you use?

Hitch-Hiker's Guide fans know this dilemma as
`who can we invent the wheel if we don't know what
colour it should be?'
and `but do people really _want_ nasally insertable fire?' :-)

This is not to mock or criticise, but to say, just try one and see what
happens. I don't think anyone can give an answer to which model to use yet.

> 4. INDEXING features. I've always liked the idea of having document
> keywords, and the META tag seems appropriate here. This does not
> preclude more sophisticated full-text indexing, but allows for fast,
> simple indexing of large collections.

A recent discussion on Usenet related to a web page containing an advert,
plus several hundred keywords so searches would find it.

I think other people are working on this problem from a different angle,
and we should perhaps wait to hear from them, the Digital Library work and
the URC stuff.

Ian, I think your article was very helpful.

Lee