Re: forwarded... [Explicit Linking is Impossible]

aronsson@lysator.liu.se
Date: Wed, 5 May 1993 23:24:26 +0200
From: aronsson@lysator.liu.se
Message-id: <199305052124.AA06898@bodil.lysator.liu.se>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: forwarded... [Explicit Linking is Impossible]

In message <9305052005.AA10795@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>,
Marc Andreessen <marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>Forwarded from comp.text.sgml... 

[forwarded message by Eliot Kimber, IBM, on the cost of hypertext]

>You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd say he probably works for
>IBM.  (Well?  Didn't *you* lose $5 billion last year?)

Marc, thanks for forwarding this message.  Perhaps I should start
reading comp.text.sgml.  I am quite new to all of this, so I don't
know what has been discussed, and what views you different people
might have.  My limited experience of writing HTML documents and
converting old plain text documents to HTML makes me agree with Eliot
Kimber's conclusions.

Adding and maintaining hypertext links up--back--forward between
chapters, sections and subsections is so easy, that I have already
automated it.  Adding hypertext links between a text and an alphabetic
index (or a dictionary) should be as easy, and just as easy to make
automatically.  But manually keeping track of hypertext links between
a text that I maintain and another text that someone else maintains,
would be next to impossible.

I don't know, Marc, what your seemingly sarcastic two line remark
means.  If you mean tbat maintaining hypertext links within large
collections of texts is easy and affordable, if you have good tools
for this, perhaps you could enlighten me and other people about this?

Thanks, Marc and NCSA, for X Mosaic.  Is there an NCSA HTML editor
too?  Today I have GNU Emacs.  I would like two Mosaic windows, and to
create hypertext links between the two documents by clicking a mouse
button.  If the destination document is maintained by someone else, he
should be notified that I have a link going there, so he doesn't
rename or reorganize his document without notifying me again.