Yoshiki Ohshima wrote: > In regards to the "is the web good?" discussion. Sure, the web is > good, but it could have been much better. For an historical account, > the idea of "objects that talk to each other bi-directionally over the > network" weren't new by the time HTTP was created. In fact, when the > word "hypertext" was invented, Ted Nelson surely wanted the things on > the net connected bi-directionally. (And ACM Hypertext conference > predates HTTP, etc., etc.)
The whole Ajax thing is really centered around that bi-directional web, and the recent discovery of the previously-ignored XMLHttpRequest which lets Javascript initiate new requests. Of course, as these things go it's still relatively crude, and currently hooking things together means lots of crufty-looking scripts. But then, I think the natural way to hook things together on the web is declarative anyway, and maybe the natural way to think about HTTP is as resources not objects, and I suspect that leads to some substantive differences with Squeak's model. I actually started playing around with these ideas some this weekend at a local conference, using DOM objects as the basic kind of object (Javascript objects show up too, but just as transient implementation details). It's just a toy a couple of us are messing around with at this point, and we haven't gotten far enough into the implementation to see what the hardest parts of the problem are yet, but I'm hopeful. One thing that occurs to me that defines the web is how transaction-oriented it is. So no *one* person has a hold on any object; everyone actually just gets a browser-local copy of the objects, and may try to commit changes to the server. This is probably very different from how Squeak works as well. But, of course, it scales way better because it is so optimized for reading, and it's quite unclear to me if a "better" web is actually feasible from a performance and management perspective (certainly Ted Nelson's transclusion seems absurd given the instability of content on the web that we should now accept as inevitable). ...Incidentally, while we were looking at some possible examples people might write in this Javascript system, we'd write something out in Javascript and then look at it and despair that it seemed quite unlikely a non-programmer would ever come up with the right incantation -- that's somewhere where the LogoWiki language implementation could offer a really nice alternative. Of course, we are just now starting to see reasonable debugging interfaces for Javascript that aren't too heavy or too obscure, and this'll mean giving up even that... :( -- Ian Bicking | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://blog.ianbicking.org _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
