[Gnu-arch-users] [FOSDEM substitute] "The Literature Shelf is not Literature"

[Thomas Lord]

Since I won't be at FOSDEM I'm not preparing a talk or slides.  I am,
however, writing a brief series of short essays about the topic I
meant to speak about.

This is the second in that series of essays.  The first was posted
earlier and is called "The King's English".


                The Literature Shelf is Not Literature

  W3C hyperlinks, as least as popularly used, never point to
  documents.  Instead, links point to hypothetical shelf space -- to
  some location deep in the depths of DNS tables, routing tables,
  network and server configurations.  To refer to a document using
  today's links, you must speak only of where you think that document
  is likely to be stored.

  As we saw in the first essay, that arrangement makes the privilege
  of being a web author very expensive and pretty much eliminates the
  possibility of creating long-lasting, high-quality archives of web
  content.

  Starting with the archival problem: Can we modify the web so that
  documents can be linked to no matter where the document happens to
  be?


* If There Were True Names

  Pretend for a moment that every document ever or yet to be created
  had, built-in, a globally unique name.

  In that case, hyperlinks could be pointers to documents by name 
  rather than pointers by locations.

  This would add an extra step to following a link.  Instead of just
  "read from http://abc.com"; the first step of following a link would
  be "find out where a copy of document://xyzzy is located," the
  second step would be to read from that location, the third step
  would be to make sure the result obtained is the document sought
  after.

  For relatively static documents, a system of true names suggests we
  should have a global system of archives.  An archive simply stores
  and forwards as many documents as it can, indexing each by its
  globally unique name (at least).  Many archives might each contain
  copies of a single document.  When there are too many documents to
  preserve, archives can apply criteria such as document popularity,
  cross-links to a document, document newness, historic significance,
  and sponsored storage.

  For interactive documents, a system of true names suggests room to
  define a set of host-independent services -- services defined as
  text that can be run anywhere.  Along with that: commodity service
  hosting (of host-independent services) and on-the-fly routing and
  scheduling to look up a "nearby", on-demand instance of a
  host-independent service.


* You Can't Do It Unless You Do

  Any competent, non-newbie software engineer should be able to tell
  you that guaranteed, global True Names are a logical and physical
  impossibility.  Documents simply do not have natural, unique names.
  Nothing can ever change this basic fact.

  But then, a good software engineer will tell you how to implement
  mostly-true True Names -- how to make a solution that's "pretty much
  guaranteed to work most of the time."  That's a topic for future
  essays.


-t