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[Gnu-arch-users] [FOSDEM Substitue] Loss, Corruption, Thievery, Confusi
From: |
Thomas Lord |
Subject: |
[Gnu-arch-users] [FOSDEM Substitue] Loss, Corruption, Thievery, Confusion and Constraint (A Global Hypertext Strawman and Its Problems) |
Date: |
Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:53:43 -0800 |
Since I won't be at FOSDEM I'm not preparing a talk or slides. I am,
however, writing a brief series of short essays about the topic I
meant to speak about.
This is the fourth essay in the series. The "cliff's notes" so far are:
1. The King's English: What Do Links Point At?
Today's links point at property.
We don't really have hypertext. All our links point to
Internet real estate, not to documents.
2. The Literature Shelf is Not Literature
True names would enable real hypertext.
True names don't really exist but can be approximated.
3. Who Owns the Author?
Authorship is the right to modulate a document's contents.
Documents require access protection. The right to modify
can be shared, transferred, and subdivided.
4. "The Document" is Just a Hypothesis
Documents are never tangible -- only signals about documents are
"real". We can possess evidence of a document but not the document
itself.
Software systems for hypertext should be about managing signals --
not storing documents.
5. Loss, Corruption, Thievery, Confusion and Constraint
Usenet counts as a global hypertext strawman, but points
up some problems to solve.
-----------------
Loss, Corruption, Thievery, Confusion and Constraint
A Global Hypertext Straw-man and Its Problems
If you squint your eyes a little bit, it looks like global
hypertext was more or less invented around 1979 by Tom Truscott
and Jim Ellis in the form of (what would become) Usenet news.
Let me describe a bit how to *use* Usenet news as a global
hypertext -- I'm not claiming that all uses count directly as
global hypertext.
(Earlier examples of non-distributed but still group hypertext, such
as Plato can also be found. Of course, the idea and prototype goes
back even further, with the like of Douglas Englebart and Vannevar
Bush -- other materials cover the history better than I can.)
* Straw-man
** A Usenet Author
Anyone who can transmit NNTP to a Usenet host, including at least
the `POST' protocol, can be a hypertext author.
An author's "frequency" -- their unique ID -- is simply their user
name. Of course, people are free to share user names and subdivide
the rights to make posts under a given name.
** A Usenet Document
We can assert that, by convention, a document is created when a
given author (name) posts a message with a subject of the form:
Subject: [DOC ___(ID)___] ____(title)____
The ID can be filled in with anything but should remain constant
throughout the lifetime of the document. The title can be filled
with anything and can be freely changed over time .... the title
is just a convenience.
Each message of that form is a signal -- a snapshot of the contents
of the document at some point in time. Other header fields, such
as the time-stamp, author name, and message id, help to distinguish
a particular transmission from all others.
Of course the body of the message is the contents of the document
in that snapshot. It's free to use mime, rich-text, etc.
The body can contain location-independent hyperlinks such as:
<sender="address@hidden" id="xyzzy">joe's cool document</>
or, to refer to a particular snapshot:
<sender="address@hidden" id="xyzzy" msg-id="2347234...">
the best version of joe's cool document
</>
Of course, we presume clients that recognize and handle this style
of link.
A real world example that comes very close to this proposal are the
various FAQ posts on various news groups. The "comp.lang.c FAQ" is
a living, referencable document with a controlled authorship.
** Distribution
Usenet distributes articles on a simple P2P network. If someone
gives me a link and says "you should take a look at msg-id
"2347234..." I don't have to necessarily go to `google.com':
I can find that at the closest, most convenient, possibly
off-line place.
** Half a Wiki
It's worth noting a convenient feature built-in to this mapping
of hypertext to Usenet: it's trivial for people to post to
discussion threads *about* any document -- just hit the `reply'
button.
If a wiki is "open editing" + "discussion" we're half way there.
** Full Wiki
A slight variation let's *anyone* post with a subject like:
Subject: [WDOC ___(ID)___] ____(title)____
and allows links like:
<id="xyzzy">Usenetpedia article on T. Jefferson</>
The key point in mentioning that these wiki features "come for
cheap" is that the structuring -- the relationship between
competing edits and commentary and authorship -- is all implicit
in the content of the snapshots of the documents. There is
no obvious need for a central server controlling an authoritative
version of a document.
* Problems
** Loss
The Usenet system as it stands makes no formal provision for
long-term archival of valuable materials. It would be a mistake,
for example, to run Wikipedia on Usenet because then infrequently
updated articles would too quickly expire and become forgotten.
** Corruption
The Usenet system includes no built-in integrity checks to make
sure that saved and transmitted articles are faithful copies.
It relies on lower-level transport and storage for that.
** Thievery
As anyone who has had a popular Usenet post forged under their
name knows, the integrity of authorship on UUNET is weak.
** Confusion
Are we looking at the latest version of that "[DOC...]" or
"[FAQ...]"? What are we to make of it when conflicting, apparently
roughly concurrent versions appear from different sources?
These problems may ultimately be unresolvable but Usenet has no
internal mechanism for at least managing the confusion.
** Constraint
With length and format limitations, Usenet imposes rather
severe constraints on document format. Sure we could split
a large or complex document into many messages, but then we
are talking about a lot of infrastructure built *over* not *of*
Usenet.
-t
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