Re: WIT

hallam@dxal18.cern.ch (HALLAM-BAKER Phillip)
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Date: Fri, 10 Jun 1994 18:35:42 +0200
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From: hallam@dxal18.cern.ch (HALLAM-BAKER Phillip)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: WIT
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I think we need to try to focus on what the exact nature of the
problems of WIT are and generaly try to get a bit more constructive.
I don't think that anyone has suggested that it is perfect. Until
you have something to play with it is difficult to know what you want.

The first stage then is we should play with it.



In article <7396@cernvm.cern.ch> you write

|>Terry Allen writes:
|>> In response, I have to remark that only a human could organize the
|>> *content* of 1500 messages anyway, and WIT doesn't improve on
|>WIT imposes a hierarchal structure up front.  Email is basically flat
|>because people don't use it right (even me until now).
|>
|>> properly labelled email in that regard.
|>Your email wasn't "properly labelled" because it did not contain a standard
|>References: line to reference the previous message.  Care to guess what
|>percentage of email is "properly labelled"? -- Try something like 6 out
|>of the last 2032 messages to www-talk!!!!
|>
|>So please explain to me how we are going force everyone to suddenly
|>start "properly labeling" their email.  I suppose we could make the
|>listsever reject all improperly labeled email.  That would at least
|>reduce the traffic on this list :-)
|>
|>News does a little bit better, at least the references are usually added
|>by the posting software.  I think it could be used if the news reading
|>software was more clever (threaded newsreaders are close but not quite).

I had a go at an email hypertexter and gateway. Also properly hypertexting
news. Both are a big win in themselves but what is still missing is a
framework for discussion.

It is quite easy to imagine a set of conventions that could interface
mail and news to WIT. In fact they are the same thing if you think about 
it. News is simply an email with 20 million recipients, most of whome will
file it as junk and delete unread.

How about:-

1) Something to do with the recipient...
2) Something to do with the subject line...
3) Something to do with embedding anchors in text...

A gateway could easily file this under the WWW-TALK WIT discussion group.
area. The topic would be WIT, it has a hypertext link to Tony's email.

What we need is a convention for typing that link as an "agree" or a 
"disagree" link. It would be easy enoug to modify the mail/news system to
give this capability. Instead of "reply to" or "post" we have a disagree 
and agree buttons producing the lines:-

Disagree <7396@cernvm.cern.ch> 
Agree <7396@cernvm.cern.ch>

These could be picked up. Alternatively we could add in a <DISAGREE> 
psuedo tag...


--
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker