First Class Links Make Second Strike

[Eric Dean Tribble <tribble>]

Date: Sat, 21 Oct 89 17:05:40 PDT
   From: mark (Mark S. Miller)

   As many of you have heard me say, a link should be though of as a
   bundle of meaning in much the same way as a sentence.  Just as very
   few documents consist of a stand-alone sentence, so will very few
   documents consist of a stand-alone link.  A traditional document is a
   structure consisting of a bunch of little statements about the world--
   sentences--which are meant to be coherent when taken together.  A
   Xanadu document is a bunch of statements about the world--sentences
   and links--which are meant to be coherent when taken together.  From
   this starting point, and in the absence of any experience of use, we
   can (I claim) frequently reason about the proper place of an
   individual link of a document by making an analogy with the more
   familiar individual sentence in a document.  I will reason from this
   analogy below.

As I read this, I realized that I hadn't heard this insight before.
One of my most vivid arguments for embedded links is tracking version
in a comment (or refutation).  While reading this I had a glimpse of
reviewing a document.  Rather than making separate links to comments and
refutations, I would put all my review links into a review document.
The document might contain all reviews I made to several version of
the document.  Or it might be versions in parallel with the document
under review to reflect the comments and such appropriate to each
version.  (I'd actually expect it to be indexed using HT information
on the reviewed document).  Notice that this scheme uses embedded
links, too :-)

Good observations!

dean