I would like to believe that WWW is an all inclusive term, but I don't
see it that way. Mark basically states that URLs are the definition
of the World Wide Web. I decided to find out for myself.
Let's quantitatively define what the World-Wide-Web is. I went to the
comp.infosystems.www.misc newsgroup and found:
382 Postings
93 About America Online
76 About browsers (netscape, mosaic, lynx, etc.)
68 About HTML and HTTP, cgi, etc.
When you factor out the AOL flame fest, almost half of the traffic is
about browsers and HTML/HTTP. Based on these figures I'd say the
people define the world wide web as running a browser that connects to
an HTTP server.
Well, how about the FAQ writers, they must have defined the web,
Here's what they say:
Documents on the World Wide Web are written in a simple "markup
language" called HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup
Language. See section 5.3 for more information about creating HTML
documents for use on the web.
Mark, you then say that the average user-on-the-street will be getting
to VRML though Mosaic. That isn't necessarily the case. What if I
fire up VRML worlds from my gopher application? Does that mean that
VRML is part of gopher too? My email package can launch URLs too,
should there be a comp.mail.vrml newsgroup too? I certainly don't
think so.
I think we have a basic philosophica difference here. Looking at VRML
as some sort of extension of WWW is shortsighted at best. I see VRML
as a totally new technology that will have a wide and far impact felt
far beyond the limited WWW world that we see today.
-- | Paul Lindner | [email protected] | Slipping into madness | | Distributed Computing Services | is good for the sake | Gophermaster | University of Minnesota | of comparison. ///// / / / /////// / / / / / / / / //// / / / / / / / /