Re: VRML - anchor/inline

Jeff Sonstein ([email protected])
Wed, 05 Apr 1995 21:08:57 -0700


> 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".

the general public may *think* about the Web as "home pages", but those who
*build* the Web itself think about URLs... that concept was the major
breakthrough which made the Web possible. the resources were all there for a
very long time, but the concept was not. users think about the Web as what
they encounter through using a paricular browser, but when I put together a
hypertext database I do not think about it in the same way and do not want
to constrain my thinking about underlying structures in that way.

as an extention of the Web (notice, I did *not* say of html), the concept of
a new MIME type which embodies perspective and movement is very useful...
and taking a "helper app" approach (at least at first) insures that our
existing information servers (I'm thinking of gopher and WWW) should be able
to deal with this adequately... it's a new type of data/resource to serve
up, but in the end it is well to remember that it is just another way to
locate and utilize a particular kind of Web resource.

Jeff Sonstein, Networks Administrator
New College of California
50 Fell Street
San Francisco CA 94102
[415] 241-1302 ext. 490