Yeah, that's right. I think these architectural principles behind URIs
were just as important as having a killer app.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:]
> Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 11:25 AM
> To: Joshua Allen;
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Expertise and Innovation - was Re: [xml-dev]
Non-
> Borg servers can authenticate Borg clients (Was Re: [xml-dev] Re:
Cookies
> at XML Europe 2004 -- Call for Participation)
>
> It was the devaluing of link maintenance ("let 'em snap").
> Before that, people broke their intellectual necks trying
> to come up with non-system identifiers. Tim essentially
> got rid of non-system identifiers. In the 'web architecture',
> it is all one system called the 'universe'.
>
> len
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joshua Allen [mailto:]
>
> > Those who said that Tim's work was "trivial", or "not-new" or
> > "didn't solve interesting problems" were right. But those who said
it
>
> Did "memex" have the concept of universal identifiers? I know that
some
> of the other hypermedia systems at the time permitted linking to a
> common global id, but it was cumbersome and not the "normal" way of
> doing links. The WWW is still lagging functionality of many of those
> hypermedia systems, but the fact that using "universal" identifiers
was
> the "standard" way of identifying targets was at least as important as
> having a killer app IMO. I think that the URI, not the hyperlink, is
> the fundamental innovation of the WWW -- and in fact the true
potential
> of the web lies with use of URIs beyond hypermedia.
>
> (And by "universal", I mean you have a string identifier that is going
> to give the exact same result no matter whether called by a user on a
> workstation in Singapore or a user at CERN.)
