Big deal?!? Paul, URL's are the *definition* of the Web! What else is
common to the Web? Not protocol. Not implementation language. Not
platform. The World Wide Web is defined, effectively, as "Things you
get to through URLs". Yes, that includes most of the stuff on the Net;
that's the whole point.
Looking at the Web as simply HTML/HTTP is, IMO, unrealistically
restrictive -- that may have been the way the Web started, but it
doesn't match the reality today. The Web is *technically* everything
you get to through URLs, and *apparently* everything you get to with
Browsers. To me, saying it isn't the Web is silly, because we're
using URLs. To an average user-on-the-street, saying it isn't the
Web is silly, because he's going to get to VRML sites through Mosaic,
and will be firing up Mosaic pages off of VRML worlds -- it's all
interconnected.
I have to agree with Mark here -- what we're describing is *clearly*
part of the Web. It just happens to *extend* the Web in a whole bunch
of new directions. (Which is nothing new; the history of the past three
years has mostly been about people extending the Web in all kinds of
ways...)
-- Justin
Random Quote du Jour:
"COBOL is the revenge of some witch burned in Salem, or a communist
plot, the work of the devil, or a secret plan by space creatures. COBOL
is a loathsome reciprocal of APL, the verbosity of one heading for zero
as the other passes infinity. It's the only language in which "hello
world" is longer in source than in executable, even after loading 47
libraries and runtime features."
-- bill davidsen