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Tim Berners-Lee on the Web 224

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the 20/20-hindsight dept.
notmyopinion writes "In a wide-ranging interview with the British Computer Society, Sir Tim Berners-Lee criticizes software patents, speaks out on US and ICANN control of the Internet, proposes browser security changes, and says he got domain names backwards in web addresses all those years ago."
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Tim Berners-Lee on the Web More

Tim Berners-Lee on the Web

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  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24, 2006 @11:22PM (#14992428)
    It's about time he got on the web. I mean, it's like 15 years old. Everyone is on it these days.

  • Sir Tim (Score:5, Insightful)

    by XanC ( 644172 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @11:27PM (#14992440)
    "Sir Tim"

    I found this amusing, along the lines of "there are those who call me.... Tim."

    Seriously though, I thought he had some great things to say about professionalism in IT. We all need to absorb and remember this:

    Customers need to be given control of their own data - not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them. IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.
    • I found this amusing, along the lines of "there are those who call me.... Tim."
      I don't think so, Sir Tim.

    • "Sir Tim"

      I found this amusing,

      I found it saddening against the recent UK Honour scandal [bbc.co.uk].

      If Sir Tim [w3.org] was viewed as a member of traditional sphere such as Law, Economics, Education he would be Lord Tim [parliament.uk].

      His work [w3.org] has changed the world in all of those traditional spheres.

      The whole interview content, our agenda would, would gain real traction in the second house of a G8 Nation.

  • Looking back... (Score:4, Funny)

    by m85476585 ( 884822 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @11:28PM (#14992448)
    "Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance?

    I would have skipped on the double slash - there's no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order - in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http://uk.org.bcs/members [org.bcs]. The last two terms of this example could both be servers if necessary."

    He could do anything differently and he would drop a slash?
    • You were expecting something monumental, like singlehandedly taking on the IPv4 standard and getting early adoption for something like v6 with IPSEC included?

      Har har.

      C//

    • Re:Looking back... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by xoboots ( 683791 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @11:35PM (#14992468) Journal
      I say it is a good thing that he just followed DNS naming and didn't have 15 years to think of a "better" way -- because the DNS name IS the better way since it saves a lot of useless reordering.
      • Of course, those of us who remember bang notation saw DNS as being oddly backwards to begin with. Why finish the name with the "root" of the tree, if that's who you'll have to ask first?
        • You might ask the same thing about postal addresses. The White House's address could be written "USA, D.C., Washington, Pennsylvania Avenue, 1600", but people seem to like it the other way around.

          • Re:Looking back... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Saturday March 25, 2006 @02:58AM (#14992860)
            Left or right isn't the problem; the problem with URLs is that they're inconsistent. Reading from left to right, the hostname goes from most specific to most general, while the rest of the path is just the opposite.

            • Re:Looking back... (Score:5, Insightful)

              by mattkinabrewmindspri ( 538862 ) on Saturday March 25, 2006 @06:50AM (#14993151)
              -like the way most Americans write dates. Most Americans write in this order: March 25, 2006 or: 03-25-2006 The second one is more specific, while the third is less specific. It would make more sense to write 2006-03-26, so the numbers get more specific, or 26-03-2006, like other countries, so the numbers get less specific.
              • 03-25-2006

                Please tell me no-one actually writes like that.

                • As far as I can tell, everyone in the US does.

                  Very confusing for people from other countries (although when the middle date is >12 at least you get to wonder something might be wrong).

                  Another problem I've had is signs with things like "Parking prohibited between Nice Friday and President's Holiday" (or whatever vacation days they have over there and expect that everyone have comitted to memory). Apparently using plain dates is a big no no, even in middle-endian format.
                  • Yes, but ... with dashes?? I thought slashes were common for the American way, I've only seen dashes used in straightforward formats so far.
                  • Also, all road signs only tell you nearby towns like: Peabody right or Gloucester left. Never the highway name. Its all part of the plan to confound foreign terrorists trying to drive here. That and rotaries.
                    • It sounds like you spent time in Massachusetts (based on the the word rotary, the cities you chose.)

                      Each state has its own convention for road signs and traffic systems (loosely based on federal standards.) Some states are downright awful (Massachusetts, New Jersey) and other states are really good. (My Ohio for instance goes out of its way to make road signage detailed and clear.)

                      Depends where you go.
                  • Another problem I've had is signs with things like "Parking prohibited between Nice Friday and President's Holiday" (or whatever vacation days they have over there and expect that everyone have comitted to memory). Apparently using plain dates is a big no no, even in middle-endian format.

                    You can't use dates for many holidays because they're not observed on the same date every year.
                    • So it's even more convenient to use those as delimiters for a time period instead of dates ! Briliant !

                      Ah well, I guess every country is entitled to its little weirdnesses...

                    • So it's even more convenient to use those as delimiters for a time period instead of dates ! Briliant !

                      Well, I suppose in some cases the reason for having the restrictions is related to the holidays, so using specific dates wouldn't work. I can't think of an example, but that's okay, because I've never seen any signs like that, either.

      • Re:Looking back... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dragondm ( 30289 )
        Actually, the UK origionaly DID use dns names in left-to-right order (uk.ac.cam.phy, for example) rather than the right-to-left order (phy.cam.ac.uk) used worldwide today. IIRC they flipped the order sometime round 1994 to be in line w/ the rest of the world.

      • Re:Looking back... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by identity0 ( 77976 ) on Saturday March 25, 2006 @07:49AM (#14993215) Journal
        Well, Usenet has had root-to-subdomain left to right ordering for some time, and it's done fine. In fact, it's a lot easier to browse newsgroups than websites by type.

        I wish more apps had a "web ordering" mode for sorting directories, files, or bookmarks. I think there was a version of Firefox with that, but the current build I'm using doesn't seem to have it.

        One reason is that it's easier to sort, since right now the server name goes from most detailed to least, while the directory structure behind it goes from least detailed to most. If you're a programmer, it's much easier to work with consistent ordering.

        Another is that it makes organization of sites with many subdomains easier, especially sub-sub-domains. Imagine sorting through

        africa.news.search.com
        americas.news.search.com
        art.some.edu
        asia.news.search.com
        cs.some.edu
        europe.news.search.com
        linux.cs.some.edu
        linux.search.com
        ms.cs.some.edu
        news.search.com
        news.some.edu
        physics.some.edu
        search.com
        store.search.com
        store.some.edu

        As

        edu.some.art
        edu.some.cs
        edu.some.cs.linux
        edu.some.cs.ms
        edu.some.store
        edu.some.store
        edu.some.physics
        com.search
        com.search.store
        com.search.linux
        com.search.news
        com.search.news.africa
        com.search.news.americas
        com.search.news.asia
        com.search.news.europe
      • It's not as if software is supposed to make things more convenient for users or anything like that. It's there to provide us with interesting but not overly taxing employment.
      • is that dns names use one order whilst file paths use another.

        HTTP urls are essentially formatted as a file path with a dns name as one component so the top level name ends up somewhere in the middle and if the hostname is long potentially quite hard to spot.
    • org.slashdot doesn't have the same ring to it.

      org.dotslash? org.slash?

    • Re:Looking back... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Tatarize ( 682683 ) on Saturday March 25, 2006 @12:04AM (#14992531) Homepage
      ech tee tee pee colon slash org dot slash dot dot org - Not as cool to say.

      There is a reason for the double slash. The double slash says it's the traditional format. The single slash signifies the domain name extension should go first. In the new-Berners-Lee format...

      For example.

      http://slashdot.org
      http:/org.slashdot

      Should both be allowed addresses. They aren't. But, because he did a double slash in the beginning we could actually flip the extention order and drop the slash and it wouldn't be confused with the original format. See, Sir Tim is such a foward thinker he added a worthless slash to save the day years later!
  • .uk.org.bcs actually no ?
  • "Slashes should have been backwards as well, you tea-smoking Vance-Baggers."

  • But how could you make a jingle out of ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @11:32PM (#14992462) Journal
    Sir Tim Berners-Lee ... says he got domain names backwards in web addresses all those years ago.

    But how could you make an advertising jingle out of

    "com dot expediAAAAAAHHH!"

    • A true Brit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@yahoGINSBERGo.com minus poet> on Friday March 24, 2006 @11:43PM (#14992486) Homepage Journal
      JANET (the Joint Academic Network) used to use X.25, which used reverse domain names, if I recall correctly. It also used HORRIBLE addressing notation. Essex University's DEC 10 (which ran the first ever massively multi-user adventure game, or rather three of them) had an address of A2206411411. (Yes, I really do remember that.)


      So the idea that he started off having trouble with the Berkeley naming convention doesn't surprise me at all.


      (I'd prefer a more heirarchical system, myself, where an organization can ONLY have one domain name and have all their actual addresses inside of that. It would make the namespace a lot less cluttered and would reduce trademark abuses. On the other hand, names would be a lot longer. However, if you're using a search engine, a portal or bookmarks most of the time anyway, that's no big deal.)

      • Re:A true Brit. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by naasking ( 94116 )
        It would make the namespace a lot less cluttered and would reduce trademark abuses. On the other hand, names would be a lot longer. However, if you're using a search engine, a portal or bookmarks most of the time anyway, that's no big deal.

        If you're going to use bookmarks, portals and search engines anyway, why not leverage them fully and make all names/identifiers collision-free cryptographic names. Trademark problem: solved permanently.

        • Re:A true Brit. (Score:5, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25, 2006 @12:20AM (#14992568)
          If you're going to use bookmarks, portals and search engines anyway, why not leverage them fully and make all names/identifiers collision-free cryptographic names. Trademark problem: solved permanently.


          In fact, every machine on the internet could be given a unique 32 bit number. Then you could connect to it using that number as the name. That would be awesome!

          • Re:A true Brit. (Score:3, Funny)

            by emag ( 4640 )
            No! 32 bits is too small! We'll have to go right to...128 bits!

            *gasp* 128-bits? Is that wise?

            What's the matter, Colonel Sanders? Chicken?

            (No, I have no idea why that popped into my head)
          • In fact, every machine on the internet could be given a unique 32 bit number. Then you could connect to it using that number as the name. That would be awesome!

            the trouble with using ip addresses directly is they are too close to the physical network infrastructure and as such not very portable (unless you own a very large private block.....).

            also combined with name based virtual hosting using domain names allows sites to be combined onto one server and later split up again if nessacery without huge wastage

      • JANET (the Joint Academic Network) used to use X.25, which used reverse domain names, if I recall correctly.

        You do. My email address used to be [user]@uk.ac.swan.pyr

        It also used HORRIBLE addressing notation. Essex University's DEC 10 (which ran the first ever massively multi-user adventure game, or rather three of them) had an address of A2206411411.

        That was a boon to to us mudders, though. You could connect directly from the PAD in each terminal room to a MUD on JANet, without having to log on to an i

      • Re:A true Brit. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MROD ( 101561 )
        Actually, the two items you mention aren't linked at all.

        The X25/X29 PAD addressing thing was very much akin to using the Internet without a DNS, that's all. A PAD was merely a terminal server which gave you a command line access. I've used TCP/IP terminal servers which were very similar.

        The naming convention used in the UK for e-mail (which was supported long after the transition to TCP/IP) was purely that, an e-mail address convention. At the time it was decided upon the ARPAnet were making their own deci
    • The "dot" would be implicit, "com expediAAAAAAHHH!" Instead of "google dot co dot uk" it would be "uk-co google". The "dot" could be explicit if needed for clarity. And actually, it would end up being "uk-com".
    • Domain names are to make remember addresses easier (instead of numerical addresses which they in turn are used to look up).

      But how would:

      com.ebay/
      com.amazon/
      org.slashdot/

      have been easier to remember? Or really easier technically overall?

      On a second thought, it would have been:

      org.dotslash/

      But still.

  • TLDs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by user24 ( 854467 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @11:40PM (#14992480)
    "I don't think we've gained anything from the .biz or .info domains - only that a few companies have benefited financially"

    at least someone realises this.

    If i had my way i'd redo the whole domain system; the distinctions between TLDs are totally irrelevent these days.
    That or enforce the distinctions, so that only ISPs can have .nets, only charities .orgs, etc etc.

    • Won't work (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rs79 ( 71822 ) <hostmaster@open-rsc.org> on Saturday March 25, 2006 @12:27AM (#14992582) Homepage
      ""I don't think we've gained anything from the .biz or .info domains - only that a few companies have benefited financially"

      at least someone realises this.

      If i had my way i'd redo the whole domain system; the distinctions between TLDs are totally irrelevent these days.
      That or enforce the distinctions, so that only ISPs can have .nets, only charities .orgs, etc etc."

      The purpose of a domain name is to make it easy for poeple. Computers don't care, they use IP addresses and the DNS is simpy a way to make easy to rememeber names that are automatically converted to IP addresses by software.

      There is no taxonomy or more correctly, ontology, behind domain names. They're arbitrary strings of characters. There is no meaning whatsoever in the TLD, that's sad articfact of the way things were; they should not ideally have any meaning.

      NSI under the original Internic cooperative agreement tried for many years to enforce the .NET rule of "internet infrastructural addresses only". It was impossible. Poeple who wanted to cheat the system always found ways and the harder NSI made it the more difficult it was for legitimate users to get .NET addresses.

      TLDS should be meaningful, but arbitrary. And pretending any sort of classification system can me made out of it belies two decades of expereince with the way we name computers on the network.

      Sir Tim may be a Sir but he's dead wrong about this expansion of tld space. Would you find it easier to remember (and yes, there are times you'll rememeber and type in, instead of looking something up in a search engine) company.biz or perhaps company.info because that was available when perhapes the only thing available in .COM was "i-my-e-companynicheproduct.com"?

      Typically the internet solves problems of scarcity (.com names) by creating new resources, not by regulating old ones.

      • "There is no taxonomy or more correctly, ontology, behind domain names."
        ? um, yes, there is. it's just that no-one adheres to it (myself included).
        Before you answer, wonder if there's any non-arbitrary relationship between the proposed .xxx TLD and it's content.

        "Would you find it easier to remember...."
        I think what STBL is suggesting is a complete rewrite of the way DNS works, according to his semantic web vision. Perhaps search engines would be a thing of the past, perhaps URLs would (though that's unlikel
    • I've owned a .org for seven years now. I intend it to be for a non-profit charity, whenever I'm rich enough to found one. I'm not yet. =)

      I wouldn't want it taken away because I'm not able to use it for its intended purpose at this time. There's no guarantee someone else would be as nice about it.
    • nit: .com was supposed to be for commercial use. .net was supposed to be for networks. .org was supposed to be the Everything Else TLD -- for personal sites, not-for-profits, everything. Didn't quite work out that way because registration was open to everyone. I think the reason .com is now generally used as the first choice for domain names is because of the heavy influence of commercial advertising, but it wasn't intended to be that way.
    • I'm a membeer of LASFS, this world's oldest science fiction club. For years, we've used lasfs.org, both for our website and email to club officers. Recently, it's gotten so bombarded by spam that we've registered lasfs.info. Going to www.lasfs.org just redirects you to www.lasfs.info, now, and there are no longer any MX records for lasfs.org email addresses; they're all lasfs.info. It's a shame, really, because we really are a registered non-profit orinazation, but .info works as the website's there for
      • Why change the whole domain? Wouldn't it be easier just to get another domain for e-mail and stop accepting e-mail on the .org domain?
    • "I don't think we've gained anything from the .biz or .info domains - only that a few companies have benefited financially"

      Oh, man. My boss got sucked up in the hype around that and had me (over my objections) enter the lotteries, sometimes several times through different domain name services, for a dozen variations on our company name, plus a bunch of other words somewhat related, for both .info and .biz. All of the ones that we won he has now let lapse. Thousands of dollars spent for nothing.

      The onl

    • A sad case of marketing anti-genius (Score:5, Interesting)

      by KingSkippus ( 799657 ) * on Saturday March 25, 2006 @05:03AM (#14993016) Homepage Journal

      The following story is true, though extraordinarily sad.

      At the company where I used to work, they registered all TLDs for their name. We had .com, .net, .org, .biz, etc.

      One day, our chief marketing goober decided that .biz was going to be the next "in" thing on the Internet, and we would be one of the first companies to capitalize on it. So we had all of our business cards chaged, our mailers, our letterhead... everything. We were explicitly told never to use the .com domain name in our business dealings, it was .biz. We, the IT gurus, begged and implored them not to do this, that it would cause more trouble in the end than it was worth, and that the only companies that use .biz are fly-by-night companies that grab the .biz equivalent of famous .com names so that they can rip people off.

      Who do you think they listened to?

      Long story short: Within a few months, after our customers, suppliers, vendors, and lots of other really, really important people started complaining that their e-mails to us were bouncing back and e-mails from us were not being received because spam blockers were automatically assuming that our .biz address either weren't valid, our chief marketing goober decided to "spend more time with his family," our old business cards, letterhead, etc. was dug out, and we were instructed never to use the .biz domain name again.

      • I'm sorry, but at that point and time, I'd have probably gone to jail for assault with a deadly weapon upon your higher-ups. That kind of blatant stupidity only serves to make our world dumber, and I'd take it upon myself as Darwin's right hand to prove 'Survival of the Fittest.'

        Sorry, I forgot, they're management. Survival of the skinniest and hardest-working, then. Yanno, like the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. ;)
  • The symantic web, as discussed, must rely on classification. To my knowledge, there is no standard for classification of information to fit data into that symantic web. Does anyone know how that is supposed to work? To my knowledge, such attempts fall over when trying to classify even the simplest of things, such as chairs. The types, descriptions, and formats of chairs and information about chairs outweighs any attempt to share that information across the entire Internet. A chair in the middle of China can
    • That would just be so black and yellow and give everyone a warm fuzzy feeling. Only the feeling you get from, you know, knowing you're protected by Symantec and all ...

      startkeylogger
    • To my understanding, the semantic web doesn't attempt to map everything onto one global ontology. I see no reason why people wouldn't be able to publish multiple definitions of "chair" without somehow breaking the semantic web. There are features is most modern metedata formats to define relationships between similar objects so that a company in the US could define their version of a chair but link it to another definition of a chair at a museum in China simply by stating that the two object are similar. Ob
      • Thanks, Okay, I see that there is benefit, but the classification of data via metadata is still not organized. The thousdands of types of chairs added to what people think are chairs, would still not narrow down a search for chairs. There are some 'artistic' chairs that are just very odd IMO. So sticking with this one example, a search for chairs would still bring up more information than could be sorted through easily. Granted, metadata makes the search smaller, but classification is still left up to the s
    • None of that matters for different reason: people can understand untagged content, therefore they won't bother to tag. It's just that simple.

      Oh yeah, and tag spam.

  • 'Duh' Browser security (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cpeikert ( 9457 ) <cpeikert AT alum DOT mit DOT edu> on Saturday March 25, 2006 @01:14AM (#14992669) Homepage
    Best comment in the interview:

    "Most browsers have certificates set up and secure connections, but the browser view only shows a padlock - it doesn't tell you who owns the certificate."

    I still can't believe that, to this very day, there is no major browser that displays the right information about a certificate by default! This is the whole point of a certificate: it tells you that paypal.com actually belongs to a real-world entity named "PayPal Inc."

    At the very least, when connected via SSL to a site with a valid cert, the browser address bar should have an extra line that names the real-world entity. A yellow padlock and location bar tell you nothing about who you're really talking to. You shouldn't have to manually examine the certificate to find out this information.

    Does anyone have any idea why even Firefox, with all its other great usability and security innovations, still gets this basic thing wrong??

    • Re:'Duh' Browser security (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Opera shows it. In the right hand side of the URL field, it shows a padlock and the name of the signing authority. Great for ebay.
    • Opera does [flickr.com].

    • Re:'Duh' Browser security (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Saturday March 25, 2006 @02:47AM (#14992835) Journal
      We made a mistake back in the day. Certificates are serving two purposes: One is to encrypt the data, one is to verify identity.

      This makes it a major pain when you just want to encrypt data without claiming to be anyone in particular, since you have to jump through a lot of hoops both on server and client side to get it working. The browser gets bitchy about a certificate that isn't signed by any of its roots, even though it may very well be the case that nobody cares.

      If we clearly thought about these two aspects, and separated them, it would become clear that A: we need a better way to just say "secure the damn connection" without claiming to be anybody and B: When a site is claiming to be somebody, it hardly makes sense to not show the claim clearly to the user. But since the concepts are all mushed up, you get a lock icon that sort of covers half the situation, mostly, and few people really realize there's a problem.
      • You must need to know WHO your talking with to create a secure connection.

        It is no point in having a secure connection to a person you do not know who is.

        You cannot know if you are talking to a man in the middle or you are actually talking to the man you want to be communicating with.

        To get the ww2 version of this:

        You got an ubersecure connection with a german spy which got an ubersecure connection to the man you think you are communicating with. Then the german spy can listen in and you nor the person you
        • Well you are right, you need to know the identity of one signer of the encryption keys to be able to verify that it is the correct key. I think there are things called key-signing parties(events) for that purpose.

          But the parent is somewhat right too, because actually you would first have to make sure that you have correctly established the identity of the root key-signing enitity over a secure handshake, which often is not the case.

          On the other hand, with an extended web of trust, man in the middle attacks

      • We made a mistake back in the day.

        We made many mistakes, but this wasn't one of them.

        Certificates are serving two purposes: One is to encrypt the data, one is to verify identity.

        Those two purposes are the *same* purpose. There is a distinction here, but you're drawing it in the wrong place.

        SSL-sytle secure connections do two things: Encrypt data and authenticate data. After establishing session keys, the data that is sent both directions is encrypted and has cryptographic authentication codes (

        • Re:'Duh' Browser security (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Saturday March 25, 2006 @12:45PM (#14993849) Journal
          >why would you send it to a random stranger? Verification of the recipient's identity is crucial.

          That's a good explanation and it's accurate. It does have a hidden assumption though.

          A lot of security analysis takes as an axiom that the threat is an intelligent and determined adversary who will crawl in through any weakness. That axiom may seem self-evident because of infosec's military heritage: if your opponent is willing to hire Alan Turing and invent the digital computer in order to read your ciphertext, you daren't leave any chink in your armor.

          If you're a civilian and willing to gamble that you'll only be a random target and that your opponents will always go for the softest targets, then you might decide on a self-signed certificate. You might believe that sniffing Internet traffic is so much easier than running a man-in-the-middle attack that you could just take your chances on MiTM.

          You'd be wrong in today's environment, though. Phishing means you really have to worry about who a public key really belongs to. Not that certs are helping very much.

          Quite a few people are proposing a compromise trust model like ssh has, where the browser UI would change so as to warn you when you're about to encrypt to an unexpected public key.

          • Quite a few people are proposing a compromise trust model like ssh has, where the browser UI would change so as to warn you when you're about to encrypt to an unexpected public key.

            This model has some good things going for it, but I don't see it as very useful for stopping phishing.

            Phishers don't use the same domain name as the legitimate site. So the browser won't warn you "the key for paypal.com has changed! danger!" If the phisher bothers to self-sign at all, at most the browser will say "you're talki
      • If you don't know who you're sending it to, why do you care if it's encrypted or not? Yes, it does protect against read-only interceptions but not against man-in-the-middle. I think it would just give people a false sense of security.
      • Add the Netcraft Toolbar [netcraft.com] to your browser and not only will you have information on each site you visit on-screen, but it also blocks access to known phishing sites.
      • This makes it a major pain when you just want to encrypt data without claiming to be anyone in particular, since you have to jump through a lot of hoops both on server and client side to get it working. The browser gets bitchy about a certificate that isn't signed by any of its roots, even though it may very well be the case that nobody cares.

        right so you've got yourself a nice encrypted connection to the man in the middle. You need some mechanism to tell you that the person you think you are linked with is
  • At the moment a lot of company knowledge is held on spreadsheets and Powerpoint slides, because companies need to see summaries. But the data has lost its semantics, so it's not usable.

    Tell me about it.

  • well, he got it wrong again (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Saturday March 25, 2006 @02:23AM (#14992805) Journal
    get rid of the dot notation entirely if you're not going to admit you just used the domain naming system that pre-existed the web

    if the server name isn't going to be the name of a server, then you can do this:

    http://uk/org/bcs/members

    and now everything is a hierarchical pathname that is resolved to a fqdn internally and nobody needs to worry that bcs.org.uk is a node on the network and members is a service on that node...

    add it to the pile of big-woops! ideas along with ken thompson's anally elided 'e' in "creat()"...
    • and now everything is a hierarchical pathname

      And now the browser can't figure out which server to contact to get the content without recursing down the tree asking stupid questions. And you can't contact the subsidiary sites if the top-level site is down.

      -scott
    • If you go with slashes instead of dots then the path could drill down to individual directories..

      (p.s. please ignore that slashdot finds links for these
      examples)

      http://co/tld [co] ... (for the nationalistic )
      http://tld/co [tld] ... (for the NewWorldOrderOneWorldGovmnt) ... /entity/subenitty/directory/subdirectory/file

      for example, calcula might be found at:
      http://us/org/pentamino/home/pentalive/calcula/ind ex.html [us]

      (and as it is currently "/index.html" is the default and might be omitted)
  • This got me thinking how strange it is for the http address to be in the address bar, instead of something like what tinyweb does. Odd how Netscape or Microsoft didn't do something like that years ago.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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