From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: LISP and AI Date: 2000/05/09 Message-ID: <3166856052016369@naggum.no> X-Deja-AN: 621051539 References: <390D17B9.34FE6F7F@san.rr.com> <390E4BA4.2AEA53C6@san.rr.com> <390F7BA0.D7E18812@san.rr.com> <390F8F7C.123F4F69@san.rr.com> <3166413990955610@naggum.no> <39116F89.8218A495@san.rr.com> <3166442542698892@naggum.no> <3911B618.11B2@esatclear.ie> <3166452687168662@naggum.no> <3166469115019645@naggum.no> <3166690977154116@naggum.no> mail-copies-to: never Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@eunet.no X-Trace: oslo-nntp.eunet.no 957867438 23215 195.0.192.66 (9 May 2000 10:17:18 GMT) Organization: Naggum Software; vox: +47 8800 8879; fax: +47 8800 8601; http://www.naggum.no User-Agent: Gnus/5.0803 (Gnus v5.8.3) Emacs/20.6 Mime-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: 9 May 2000 10:17:18 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp * Espen Vestre | Yes, I was puzzled by this too. The only thing I could think of | was the fact that bibliographic references may refer to a section | or page range of a second document and not only a _point_ in it. Please ignore HTML and the WWW in any discussion of hypertext. They are like bringing PostScript and laser printers into a discussion of literature. There is no worse implementation of hypertext concepts than the in-band anchors that requires changing both (there are only two in HTML) documents if you need a particular connection. In fact, the HTML/WWW implementation of "hypertext" is so fundamentally flawed that it is probably a great disservice to hypertext to call it "hypertext" to begin with, and as witness, the inability of people to consider a bibliographic references that does not match the HTML _implementation_. Consider the glossary that defines hypertext links _to_ its defined terms. Instead of myriad explicit links in each document in the document set covered by the glossary, the links may be defined as whatever matches a rule in those documents. A rendering engine would load the glossary and apply the rules to highlight glossary terms, or perhaps make them more accessible by popping up a small window with the definition. Instead of this being coded explicitly wherever a glossary term is used, it would all be arranged in the glossary, once. Consider the root document of a document set that contains rules for which documents (such as the glossary) whose rules should apply to which documents in the set. Conventional bibliographic references expresses such relationships with annotations in the library records. Note that there is no unique text to highlight or click on in this case. This is meta-information for the hypertext system. Consider the critique of a document that includes excerpts from it and does so using in-lined hypertext links instead of copies of the text itself. Consider the meta-critique that contains a full list of all such references for the purposes of scholarly research and ratings. The former would not necessarily be able to influence the base document when somebody reads it, such as to inform the reader adbout the critique, but the latter would, as well as responses and rejoinders in a debate where various authors both discuss the type of critique and rate them. Consider the continuous publication of a medical journal where it is incredibly important to link from articles in the past to new and updated articles in the future with crucial information about the role of the update. A new article would typically contain a small passage that it updates, contradicts, etc, previous articles. It is not uncommon for the journal librarian/editor to supply such links in a separate bibliographic unit, such as a side-bar. A mechanized hypertext system would represent such links with meta-documents that _all_ the articles in the system would point to for updates to themselves. Consider the continuous application and concurrent drafting of laws and regulations in a society. The entire legal world is intertwined in extremely interesting ways from a theoretical hypertext point of view. Political discussions often take the form of contributing to a decision on what may be done within the framework of certain regulations, such as budgets, legal authorities and procedures, etc. Counter-arguments frequently attack the hypertextual nature of the argument instead of the textual contents in the shape of denying or rejecting an interpretation of such authority or its application. Court arguments frequently involve comparing prior applications and cases to present cases. Yet, each document produced contains only a small number of the hypertextual links involved: the remainder are implicit or take the shape of "to"-links instead of "from"-links. In the world of bibliographic references, there is a lot more going on than just pointing to books or pages, or a footnote someplace that has an ISBN. Trivializing the bibliographic reference to whatever HTML can represent is like arguing that PostScript cannot represent irony, so therefore it is only characters, like all other characters, or denying that laser printers can reason because they produce documents that contain reasoning. (Nobody argues that laser printers can reason, just as nobody argues that hypertext links can be "discovered" from context and contents, which is a strawman argument frequently used against advanced hypertext theory.) For those who want to understand how hypertext started, I urge you to read Vannevar Bush's original article in the Atlantic Monthly. In particular, he discusses machine-aided annotations in a way that would make it impossible for anyone who had read that article to even think that hypertext links were contained _in_ documents -- that is merely an implementation optimization applicable in a few circumstances and not at all generally. Generally, we make links into, between, and out of read-only documents that we do not own or control. HTML does not allow us to work with documents we do not own or control except by pointing at them as static objects. #:Erik