[thelist] What shall we do with the W3C DOM?

Garrett Coakley garrett at polytechnic.co.uk
Thu Nov 7 11:18:01 CST 2002


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On Wed, 6 Nov 2002 12:03:15 -0600 (CST) Ben Henick wrote:


> If you want an example of a baby step of what PPK's talking about, dig
> into iht.com.  Between the pagination and the "clippings"
> functionality(which has been since duplicated on a couple of other
> sites, I've noticed) iht.com might be considered a proof-of-concept.


Kind of proof of concept, but also not really. I think I see where
ppk is coming from. One of the things that this would lead to is
that the idea of a 'web site' as such would start to break down.

If you think about the concept of the Semantic Web
(http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/) and computers having the ability to
understand the data they were looking at - as opposed to the fairly
crude keyword searching we have now - in conjunction with XFML
(http://www.xfml.org) and other meta-data resources.

Now take that, and add in a personal content aggregation bot (somewhat
like news.google.com) that learns the type of information you are
interested in. Start to look at how sites split their content up now
(Metafilters metatalk page, the Apache section on slashdot) and you get
an idea of where this is going.

Think of Web content as Lego blocks.

Your bot will construct a 'portal', a page for you built out of pieces
of other sites. A typical day could start off with you instructing your
bot (Arthur C Clarke called it a 'personal search engine' in "Light Of
Other Days"):

"I'd like to know all there is to know about fly fishing for beginners,
place the content in window three, and bring up the current grocery
prices in window four. Keep window five on top though, I haven't
finished reading Madhu's latest recipe yet. actually, while your at it,
can you grab the list of ingredients and cross reference it with window
four"

Or something like that.

Fascinating idea though....

G.


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