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

The first web browser was a publishing tool

Author:David Galbraith
Posted:6/29/2000; 8:34:38 PM
Topic:The first web browser was a publishing tool
Msg #:18287
Prev/Next:18286 / 18288

I just finished reading TBL's biography and I'd forgotten all about it. There is something really exciting going on here, that harks right back to the early days of the web and some of TBL's ideas about the semantic web.

There would be three components to a distributed application environment that allowed you to build an application within a browser from a set of components on the web: 1. A network infrastructure that allowed you to search for these components. 2. An IDL based on XML to automatically integrate the components. 3. A metadata framework based on XML to find out about remote data.

1. A half way house between Napster-like and Gnutella-like networking, with XML based RPC calls to content and a simple metadata description for the payload that is returned - could realize some of the aims of the 'semantic web'. In other words I search the web for any methods that describe how to spell check in, lets say, German - and this functionality is found and added to my application, in realtime, on-the-fly.

3. A universal getMethods() method, which defines an interface in an RDF-like manner to return all of the methods available at a particular resource and the paramaters they take (like a DCOM lookup). A universal API defined in XML if you like.

3. A modular RSS system to account for all types of metadata.

DG

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Galbraith - Chief Architect, founder Moreover.com - the webfeed company david@moreover.com 415-577-8828 (US) 0777-565-8880 (UK) favorite webfeed: http://www.moreover.com/xml

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