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Tim Berners-Lee thought we should have a way of defining strongly-typed queries: <ISINDEX TYPE="iana:/www/classes/query/personalinfo"> I can be somewhat confide
by anyfoo 10y ago
Tim Berners-Lee thought we should have a way of defining strongly-typed queries: <ISINDEX TYPE="iana:/www/classes/query/personalinfo"> I can be somewhat confident in saying, in retrospect, I am glad the more generic solution won out.
The author does not explain why he is glad that the more generic solution won out. Having strongly-typed queries might have brought as much closer to some approximation of a practical "semantic web" and done some wonders for web services, accessibility and others.
Maybe he is glad because not having any strong typing allowed us to have the flexible, completely free-form web interfaces we have today, but who's to decide that that wouldn't have emerged anyway; maybe even in a slightly saner form than the horrible mess we have today.
On a completely unrelated note:
Given the power of search engines, it’s possible the best URN format today would be a simple way for files to point to their former URLs.
This raises immediate concerns about security and spam, but that may be solvable somehow.
That being said, I really enjoyed reading this thoroughly researched history a lot, even more than the previous, also great installment about CSS's history. (But my preference is just because I'm not a Web/Design guy.)
- zackbloom 10y agoSorry for not clarifying that. It's possible I'm only glad because it has turned out that forms are much more important than search alone. I also think it's roughly a good thing that we were ultimately given relatively basic tools, and allowed to build all sorts of things with them. I do agree that many unfortunate decisions were made in those early days, many of them because they were just not aware of what problems we would be using the Internet to solve in 2016.