Subject: Re: LISP and AI From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 2000/05/04 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3166452687168662@naggum.no> * Russell Wallace <rwallace@esatclear.ie> | I'm curious: what do you see as the navigation problem to which HTML | missed the solution? The ability of one document to introduce a link between two other documents, sometimes known as a "meta-link". Where implemented, they are easily used to track how you arrived at a given document, and thus you can browse your "journey" through a number of documents. This particular "application" can be implemented by many other means, but the general facility that would make it simple and easy is missing from HTML. I think of HTML links as GOTO. The effort required to keep from getting messy outweights the merits of their proper use. (The even-more-impenetrable-than-the-SGML-standard SGML-related standard on Hypertext and Time¹, actually got this completely right, incorporating all available hypertext research at the time it was published, and subsequently updated intelligently to account for further development. Unfortunately, it uses SGML for its own meta-notation, which makes it an order of magnitude more complex than necessary, and it relies so heavily on the entity structure, which is the least understood aspect of SGML and also completely missed by "the HTML generation", that it takes more effort to study it than even most would-be experts can ever hope to be rewarded for having done.) #:Erik ------- ¹ ISO/IEC 10744:1997 Information technology -- Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language (HyTime), 468 pages.