Subject: Re: LISP and AI From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 2000/05/04 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3166469115019645@naggum.no> * gat@jpl.nasa.gov (Erann Gat) | I presume that a browser history is an example of "this particular | application" being "implemented by ... other means" but I don't see | how having bidirectional links in HTML would add any functionality. The idea is not a "bidirectional links", but the bibliographic reference, which was a quite well developed concept prior to HTML. I wrote: "The ability of one document to introduce a link between two other documents'. This is not a bidrectional link in the first place. It's a third-party link if you want. There is no anchor marked up as such in either of the documents involved, and the link is certainly not in the documents in question. Instead, the anchors are described in the third document through various means of naming nested objects and the link between them is then established, with a purpose, such as a comment describing how the two anchor points related. HTML missed the opportunity (to put it mildly) to aid in locating and naming the structured, nested objects in a document, as well, so it's no wonder people can't really escape thinking about links and anchors _in_ the documents without spending some effort thinking about why it doesn't even make sense to predefine which words or ranges of text should be elevated to anchorhood. After all, most of prefer to buy the marker pens separately from the books and color on our own, but with HTML, only pre-colored books are available. #:Erik