09:44, Thursday 15 Jun., 2000 Link

Some interesting comments about the title tag, at Flutterby. What I'd like to see: Every connection between two units (pages) should have information associated with it. (We do, to an extent, with the title tag but it's not very useful.) Minimising entities, we should encode that information in the same way a unit (page) is encoded, that is in html. By convention, this connection unit should be some kind of microcontent, but this shouldn't be dictated by the markup language. This connection information could be a list of reference links (indicating whether they are expansions, objections, supporting evidence, etc.), a photo thumbnail, the complete text of a footnote -- in short, context and descriptions of the link(s) at that anchor point. (This also removes us from the problem of having to shape our writing to include context in the text itself.) Of course, this connection can also include its own anchors which in turn have their own connections so the browser needs a way to move focus. These connection units should have backlinks so they can be used in many places in the source text and when you move focus onto one you see where it was referenced and also its context. This would help www hypertext in so many ways. Note: In the argument over whether hypertext needs one type of connection or >1, I'm on the >1 side.

On a similar note, we need a better way of having conversations. I would much prefer to have that Flutterby conversation across a number of weblogs, tracked and threaded by permalinks. I wonder if I could write a system to do this? It's on my Summer project list.