For those who need to understand how the Web is changing the way businesses work
Meta Data
| Vol/Issue:
v97 #3 (December 5, 1997, 1997)
Author/Editor: David Weinberger Central Meme: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy Favorite Beatle: John. Duh. Current Personal Crisis: Have lost reasoning behind desktop piles Home page: http://www.hyperorg.com Contact information: Click here. |
| #3 in Series of Historic Collectors Issues
Welcome to the third beta issue of Journal of The Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO). We think you'll find this latest attempt new and improved, albeit it in vague and unsettling ways.
If you came here because you heard David Weinberger's commentary on "All Things Considered," howdy and do not be alarmed by the fact that this is not titled "The Hyper World Journal." Between the big broadcast and the publication of the journal itself, calmer heads prevailed and we renamed it.
The JOHO is very much a work in progress. So,
let me know what, if anything, I
can do to make the JOHO more valuable and useful to you. |
A new standard is going to transform the Web. No, it's not VRML with its promise of 3D moonscapes or PICS with its promise of nudie-free browsing. It's XML -- a standard that doesn't touch the way documents look but does make it possible for the Web to be more than a giant slide viewer.
JOHO went straight to the source and asked Tim Bray -- one of the forces behind XML, and one of the most influential people on the Web -- to tell us why this new standard is so important.
But first a little background:
HTML is an elegant solution to a particular problem: how to make documents visible on the Web without having to rely on a proprietary document format from a particular vendor.
HTML's strength as a viewing format is, however, also its greatest weakness as a format for moving information around. HTML only lets a document creator state how this or that paragraph should look when viewed in a browser. XML, on the other hand, lets you attach extra information -- metadata -- to your document file so that the application that's viewing it (say, a normal browser extended with some Java) can do interesting and useful things with it.
This is crucial if the Web is about more than viewing documents. The Web provides an unprecedented connective platform for doing all sorts of work, not just looking at pages. But that means that the Web data -- HTML pages -- need to contain more information than what's strictly required to make the document viewable. For example, wouldn't it be nice if, say, a spreadsheet viewed on the Web knew not only about the fonts of the numbers in the cells but also knew about the formulas behind them? HTML only knows about the look of the document. With XML, information about the formulas -- and about anything else -- could also be built into the document.
The benefits will be substantial. For example, XML can make search engines smarter by letting them know what a document or a section of a document is about. XML can let a browser show or hide comments or other elements on a page depending on the user's preferences. XML can even be used to turn a document essentially into a database that can be queried for information by a Java application. It really is quite open-ended.
Let's take an example. With HTML, if you want to create a bulleted list, you use the <ul> tag ("ul" stands for "unordered list") and then use <li> ("list item") to display an entry as a bulleted item. But not all bulleted lists are the same. Some are parts lists, some are ingredients lists, some are lists of members, etc. With XML, you can make up tags that reflect the different types of content so that (with an appropriate application behind the scenes) users can specify that they only want to search within, say, parts lists. Or an application could go through all your pages and compile a database of all the ingredients required to stock a kitchen (or, in a more manly example, a hangar ... and don't forget the Testosterone Sprinkles!).
Basically, HTML made Web pages good looking. XML makes them smart, too.
Now, let's hear from Tim Bray, independent consultant, founding member of the XML effort, co-editor of the XML specification, and author of the first-ever XML parser (www.textuality.com/Lark/). (An XML parser is software that figures out what the parts of an XML page are and hands them to another software program that needs those pieces.) (By the way, the title of the following is Tim's creation.)
JOHO: Tim, what's driving the amazingly rapid acceptance of XML? Tim: HTML makes easy things easy. Hence the Web. But it's running out of steam, on a few fronts. Spiders and indexers are getting further behind and slower, not faster and better. Authoring systems are still kind of pathetic. And authoring itself is dangerous; the vendors tend to move the technology out from under you every 15 minutes. As for formatting, it's OK; unless you happen to be a professional who got used to desktop publishing technology before the Web came along. So what the XML Conspiracy did was to take the ISO SGML standard, which (while elderly and verbose, has good design integrity), shrink the prose, drop some technical minutiae that make it awkward on the Net, dress it up in rock-n-roll spandex, and declare the victory of the future (XML) over the past (HTML as we know it). XML is not going to change your life. It will end up being, more or less, the "ASCII" of the Internet. ASCII is a standard that nobody ever thought much about, that never fueled any IPOs, but that several generations of computers and networks relied on for pumping data around. XML allows you to put markers in your data saying what its parts are, attach multiple stylesheets to the same text, index things with a little intelligence, give mobile code (Java, ActiveX, whatever) something to chew on, and use a Web resource for multiple purposes. None of these capabilities represent Media Convergence or Electronic Commerce Paradigm Shift or any of the other things that makes Silly Valley denizens breathe hard. But the Web needs all of them in the worst way, right now. |
Gray Matter
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Middle World ResourcesA BiWeekly Compendium of Resources |
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| Walking
the Walk
Randy Hinrichs, Intranets: What's the Bottom Line? (Prentice Hall), interviewed in CIO Web Business, says:
...
The power is in local applications. Two thousand Web sites of two, three, six people who create from the bottom up are creating the intranet. The applications are created by users, who build what they need locally. |
Cool Tool
For the Hyperlinked Organization In the last issue, we touted ICQ, an instant messaging system that lets you chat with anyone else on line with the system. InformationWeek shortly thereafter ran an article on the topic, talking about two new entrants, Paging System from Ichat and Ding!Switchboard from Activerse. In addition to a shining factoid from Jupiter Communications ("By 2002, 80% of Internet users will use instant messaging..."), the piece, by Justin Hibbard, contains one truly scary quotation. Bruce Ecsktein, director of promotion research at MCA Records says: "Instant messaging allows our people not to pause from the phone yet still find out some information from another part of the company that they might not have access to otherwise." In other words, in case you're not multitasking enough, this software will let you be distracted in yet another direction. And with a foot mouse -- oh, they're sure to come -- you can do your email, download Pam Anderson nudies, and play Quake II all at the same time. Welcome to the hyperlinked organization! |
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Internetcetera
The Internet access market is growing 25% a month, according to a study by the Maloff Group international, reported in the Nov. 3 issue of InternetWeek. During 1997, the cost of monthly access by dial-up connection dropped 14.7% to $22 about a dedicated T1 line increased 13.2% to $1,543.
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This ad, with the headline "Apparently your email has arrived," advertises Hitachi laptops. It has been playing all over the place. And I think it's wonderful ... as an example of dumb marketing and of old world thinking. A Two-fer! I'm excited.
Let's begin with dumb marketing. Apparently, the take-away of the ad is "A laptop so powerful, it can send email!" Imagine that! Jeez, my six year old got a Power Rangers pencil box that can send email. It was free with a Whopper. What focus group came up with that message?
And as far as Old World business goes, here's an ad designed to appeal to those who think that they're most effective when they're sending orders from a distance (and from a height up the org chart) that interrupts everyone's normal course of business so they can scurry around in a doomed attempt not to get fired. Nice place to work, eh? Not quite the model of a hyperlinked organization where email is a collaborative tool, not a management weapon.
In fact, here's a mini bogus contest for this week: What email would you like to send back to the a-hole who sent you the "Do This Now" email from his or her Hitachi laptop? Profanity not allowed.
The jury is in. OJ is innocent, the nanny is guilty, and I have too many animated gifs on my home page.
Larry Bohn, relaxing after his stint as president of PC DOCS, writes:
Did you know that Joho is Indonesian for penis? I think it's cute.
Ohmigod! That's why the waiters were laughing when I ordered the Joho Soup at Cafe Jakarta!
Mike Montgomery has some improvements on the name of JOHO:
Just browsed through the 2nd issue of JOHO. While it may not be up to the standards of the Hyperlinked Office Herald Oracle or the Hyperbased Official Journal of Oxymorons, you certainly can give them a run for their money, acronym-wise.
Mike also complains that there isn't enough "blue underlined text" in the previous issue of JOHO. This paragraph should even things out. Thanks Mike!
Among those who fell into a hypnotic trance looking at my lovely floating org chart graphic was eminent newsletter editor, Keith Dawson. Keith's email 'zine, Tasty Bits from the Technology Front, is one of my favorite sources of information about what's going on with the Web from a moderately technical point of view (i.e., I can understand most of it). Keith writes:
Nice rag. But lose the GIF animation. Or at least set the repetitions to a small finite number.
Sorry, Keith, but if I do that, I can't be responsible for people who wake from their gif-induced trance abruptly and suffer acute psychic trauma, not to mention clucking like a chicken whenever a bell is rung.
Another eminent editor, Chris Locke, author of the always amazing Entropy Gradient Reversals (is there something about writing a newsletter that causes the Crappy Name hormones to kick in? -- JOHO being no exception), writes:
One nit: I'd 86 all those animated gifs on the home page -- makes it too hyperactive. no, that's NOT good.
Feel free to use anything from http://www.rageboy.com/intranets.html of course. also feel free to acknowledge how much attitude you ripped off from EGR. Just kidding.
Chris not only has been right-er about the Web earlier than just about anyone, he is a writer on a par with, say, Hunter Thompson. And I am happy to acknowledge that I did indeed rip attitude off from EGR. In particular, I stole from Chris the mixture of post-Modern ennui and wan-but-intense elfin charm that characterizes my choice of background gif. Thanks, Chris!
Nevertheless, he is gruesomely wrong about the floating org chart animated gif, as are Keith, and Mark Dionne and many others. And I can prove in four words that the animated org chart ought to stay forever on my home page: I drew it myself.
Keith Dawson of TBTF goes on to make an excellent point, albeit not related to the animated gif.
In the previous issue, I wrote:
>Metadata is a crucial information enabler, since, when you're >overwhelmed by information, you have no practical choice but >to navigate via information about the information.
Keith comments:
So, smart guy, take the next step. What about when you're overwhelmed by metadata? How long has it been since your bookmark list's entries were leaf nodes? A measure of how well you're keeping up with exponential growth is your bookmark file's number of degrees of separation: how many clicks from a bookmark to a leaf node?
First, let make clear that a "leaf node" is an actual URL on your bookmark list, as opposed to being a folder within a folder, etc.
Yes, we are getting overwhelmed with metadata. And, yes, you can count every folder as metadata about its contents, so you can easily have metadata of metadata of metadata. So, just having metadata doesn't mean that your life is going to be any better.
You have the same three choices for navigating metadata about metadata as you do for navigating metadata: you can organize it into browsable hierarchies (e.g., a foldering system), you can do brute force text searches through it without regard to hierarchies, and/or you can establish hyperlinks among them (which are themselves really a type of metadata).
But the main thing -- especially after being called "smart guy" -- is to try to try to establish who's really the smart guy by "going to the next step." So, here goes: Hey, smart guy, take the next next step and recognize that all information is meta-data.
Ha! That should stop you in your tracks for a while. And if anyone can make sense of it, please let me know.
Bret Pettichord of Unison writes:
I don't really like your logo. It looks like a house. It also looks like an old-style org chart with a line connecting all the peons together. To me it looks like a picture of some sorry corporation that knows it needs to be lean and webbish, but still wants to hold on to job titles and the status and structure they provide.
Interesting. To me it looks like two butterflies making love. Pass me the next ink blot, please ...
He also comments, referring to the article that used some Web statistics to prove that the Web began on the very day JFK was assassinated:
It could be me, but I did not follow the math for your web is 2,000 years old. I understood that you didn't believe some of the numbers that were cited, but i didn't get much more than that. Was there a serious a point here, or were you just sniping at Dataquest? Was your headline a hyperbole? Sorry, but it's harder to read sarcasm and irony from out here in Texas.
Good point. I actually miscalculated the date of the Web's origins, due to my foolhardy insistence on using a Pentium chip for doing mathematical operations. In fact, the statistics prove that the Web began on the very day the U2 spy plane was shot down. Also, Gary Powers is an anagram of Tim Berners-Lee. And, yes, we will begin an experiment in which we print all sarcastic comments in red.
Experiment's over.
Ross Knight presents the following entry in our contest to come up with what you don't say when your boss asks you to express the downside of a Web-based system that you've just been talking up to her:
The Web is the path of Light, the way to Revelation. True, it promotes all manner of vice and degeneracy. Yes, it undermines the foundation of all that is good and right in the world, its hyperlinks fostering Chaos, its chat groups engendering Evil. Surely the Day of Reckoning cannot be far away. We should rejoice and have gladness in our hearts, for the prophesied coming of the Messiah is upon us!
Ross also suggests an alternative to my five-word formulation of the essence of the Web ("many small pieces loosely joined"):
Harvey Bingham writes:
Please consider accessibility for the disabled in the design. I suggest you submit your URLs, one at a time, to Bobby for an analysis of both accessibility and cross-browser compatibility.
The initial Bobby URL is http://www.cast.org/bobby
Interesting site. "Bobby" is a program that looks at a page and tries to identify problems the disabled may have with it. You'll be happy to know that except for the tiny bullets not containing "ALT" labels (if you don't know what I mean, consider yourself blessed for you do not know what you need not know), the site passed Bobby with flying colors.
We did learn, by the way, that Bobby Doesn't Like Tables. Tough nuggies, Bobby!
From the Web:
Deep Thoughts by Kids
From an actual newspaper contest where entrants age 4 to 15 were asked to imitate "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey."
I believe you should live each day as if it is your last, which is why I don't have any clean laundry because, come on, who wants to wash clothes on the last day of their life? --Age 15
Give me the strength to change the things I can, the grace to accept the things I cannot, and a great big bag of money. --Age 13
It sure would be nice if we got a day off for the president's birthday, like they do for the queen. Of course, then we would have a lot of people voting for a candidate born on July 3 or December 26, just for the long weekends. --Age 8
Democracy is a beautiful thing, except for that part about letting just any old yokel vote. --Age 10
Home is where the house is. --Age 6
I bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween. -Age 13
I often wonder how come John Tesh isn't as popular a singer as some people think he should be. Then, I remember it's because he sucks.--Age 15
For centuries, people thought the moon was made of green cheese. Then the astronauts found that the moon is really a big hard rock. That's what happens to cheese when you leave it out. --Age 6
My young brother asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth--that most of us go to hell and burn eternally...but I didn't want to upset him. --Age 10
When I go to heaven, I want to see my grandpa again. But he better have lost the nose hair and the old-man smell. --Age 5
I once heard the voice of God. It said "Vrrrrmmmmm." Unless it was just a lawn mower. --Age 11
I like to go down to the dog pound and pretend that I've found my dog. Then I tell them to kill it anyway because I already gave away all of his stuff. Dog people sure don't have a sense of humor. --Age 14
As you make your way through this hectic world of ours, set aside a few minutes each day. At the end of the year, you'll have a couple of days saved up. --Age 7
Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher. That is, I used to, until she got an unlisted number. --Age 15
It would be terrible if the Red Cross Bloodmobile got into an accident. No, wait. That would be good because if anyone needed it, the blood would be right there. --Age 5
Think of the biggest number you can. Now add five. Then, imagine if you had that many Twinkies. Wow, that's five more than the biggest number you could come up with! --Age 6
The only stupid question is the one that is never asked, except maybe "Don't you think it is about time you audited my return?" or "Isn't it morally wrong to give me a warning when, in fact, I was speeding?" --Age 15
Once, I wept for I had no shoes. Then I came upon a man who had no feet. So I took his shoes. I mean, it's not like he really needed them, right? --Age 15
If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize world peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be until the looting started. --Age 15
Now, some of these stretch my credulity (man, that hurts -- but in a good way) in terms of the ages attributed to them, but you get the idea.
So now let's do some relevant to the wonderful world of the hyperlinked organization. For example:
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I like to think of hyperlinks as a type of love that connects strangers. But unlike real love, they don't require paying for drinks or apologizing afterwards. Imagine if we could capture all of the knowledge that exists in a company. Then we could put it on a t shirt and have a really cool giveaway at trade shows. If you search on AltaVista, you'll find there are more Web documents that talk about "love" than "sex." Which is great news because it means there are fewer pages I have to look at. In the future, everyone will work from their homes, in their pajamas. This sounds great except on Dress Down Fridays because I really don't want to have to work naked. |
Your turn ...
(In any case, don't forget to write. At this early stage, I really want your frankest criticisms and suggestions. Later on, I'll only want to hear nice things, so this is your chance...)
The following information was found trapped at the top of my washing machine when I ran some issues of the JOHO through it.
The JOHO is a free, independent newsletter written and produced by David Weinberger. He denies responsibility for any errors or problems. If you write him with corrections or criticisms, it will probably turn out to have been your fault.
Subscription information, or requests to be removed from the JOHO mailing list, should be sent to [email protected].
Dr. Weinberger is represented by a fiercely aggressive legal team who responds to any provocation with massive litigatory procedures. This notice constitutes fair warning.
Any email sent to the JOHO may be published in the JOHO and snarkily commented on unless the email explicitly states that it's not for publication.
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is no longer available, and will return once we fix the eject button and
pending the outcome of the lawsuit.)
The Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization is a publication of Evident Marketing, Inc.
"The Hyperlinked Organization" is trademarked by Open Text Corp. JOHO gratefully acknowledges Open Text's kind permission to use this felicitous phrase.
"JOHO," "Internetcetera," "One-Question Interview" and "Buzz Soup" are trademarks of Evident Marketing, Inc.