to read: hypertext in historical context. "vannevar bush and ted nelson revisited", they promise. let it see.

lot of stuff there.

www talk from 1992.

tim berners-lee (timbl) and dan connolly talking about writing a html dtd: also the dream about wysiwyg editors was still in place: it may be that the wysiwyg editors have a linear style structure because that is intuitive to people. I don't know a lot of people who use author/editor (which maintains structure). Maybe real people actually think in terms of styles and fix the document to look right, then they are happy to have the structure deduced.

So if we went for a nestable HTML which would be cleaner for those who apreciate recursion, we would have to have a hypertext editor which made the structure visible. I don't have experience enough to know whether real information providers (group secretaries, for example) would be into generating nested elements -- maybe the styles are useful to keep as the current `user interface metaphor' of word processors. (It also makes making the editor easier!)

the paper steven newcomb and michel biezunski presented en barna: A Draft Reference Model for ISO 13250 Topic Maps

newcomb (audio/mpeg, 634 KB) 2002 at the xml-europe conference in barcelona.

information on oasis about topic maps: xml cover page

steve newcomb 1995 about ontologies: So "where's the beef -- er, I mean `content'?" I think it's all around us, in the form of ordinary documents, just waiting to be connected together and then to participate in some sort of emergent phenomenon. Now that HyTime gives us the ability to address it all (and therefore to make arbitrary links among all of its components and subcomponents), we can start experimenting with such things as handwritten domain-specific ontologies, and more automatic approaches using classifier systems and genetic algorithms that will operate in the realm of ideas.

about the roots of markup languages and <xml>.