Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Linux Magazines

Author:Dennis Peterson
Posted:10/20/1999; 10:06:29 AM
Topic:Today's scriptingNews Outline
Msg #:12198 (In response to 12191)
Prev/Next:12197 / 12199

Pretty cool, and a lot of fun to play with. If I were a VC, I would have the following questions:

1) They talk about publishing brains to a website. It sounds as though they have their own format which defines a brain. Do they intend to replace the web with their own style of hypertext?

2) Their style of hypertext is somewhat different than that of the web, at least as far as the java applet is concerned. Links are bidirectional, and go from whole-document to whole-document, unlike the web in which outbound links are located in different parts of the document. The Web style is more useful I think, but the Brain gives very fast navigation, if document titles are descriptive enough.

3) Tim Berners Lee mentions in his new book that having outbound-only links was a conscious decision. If links are bidirectional, either (a) you have to embed the link in both documents--impossible if you don't control both--or (b) you need a central link database, which impacts scalability of a global system. He decided to give up bidirectionality and perfect consistency, in return for unlimited scalability. thebrain.com probably won't scale in the same way--it seems more like something akin to the early local-only hypertext systems, where all the content is under your control, than something for the global web.

But it's a cool navigational aid for a website, and would make a killer desktop. If I were them I'd make a Linux version that integrates with Gnome or KDE...



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