I don't know of anyone who still thinks of the term "WWW" as "The set of
all representations of information and services which can be accessed
by a Universal Resource Locator". They think of the "WWW" as "home pages".
As an example, what WWW browser defaults to a FTP session? or a Telnet
session? They all default to a "home page" wich may have a FTP URL in it.
I don't want to argue this point on this list. We can do it in e-mail and
spare the list.
Does the lack of responses to my original message mean that I asked a
totaly stupid question, or are people thinking the issue over. This isn't
a major point of concern; it just looks/feels wrong. From an implementation
viewpoint, parsing URLAnchor is no easier or harder than parsing WWWAnchor.
BUT, the connotation implies "home pages"; and it seems to me that to a
large degree the denotation also means "home pages".
I guess I still don't understand why WWWAnchor implies "The set of all
representations of information and services which can be accessed by a
Universal Resource Locator" in a clearer way than URLAnchor would. It is
very possible that I am wrong, but URL != WWW. And to pursue this point
further just a little bit, since GopherSpace can represent all of
"WWW"space, and "WWW"space can represent all of GopherSpace, does that
mean that we can say that GopherSpace == WWW == URL? Why not right?
Give me any URL and I can put it in a Gopher Menu. Hey! does that mean
that we modify VRML to use: GOPHERSPACEAnchor and GOPHERSPACEInline?
It seems to me that if people decided to change WWWAnchor and WWWInline
to URLAnchor and URLInline, now would be a good time to do it - while
VRML is still in draft mode.
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Neophytos Iacovou Distributed Computing Services
University of Minnesota 100 Union St. SE
email: [email protected] Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA