From ImageWeb

Contents 1 Web architecture and principles 1.1 General resources 1.2 Specific issues 1.3 Historic documents

Web architecture and principles

General resources

• http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/ - I still find this the best resourse for discussion and explanation of general architecture and principles of the worlkd wide web. It is a page of (links to) notes by Tim Berners-Lee, developed over a period of several years, explaining the rationale for various aspects of web design in clear and compelling terms.
• http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ - this is the "official" version of web architecture from the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Technical Architecture Group (TAG).
  • http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ - World Wide Web Consortium's Technical Architecture Group home page

Specific issues

• http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#httpRange-14 - "httpRange-14", managing use-mention distinctions on the World Wide Web. This has been a hotly debated topic for some time, and the current resolution is not as clear-cut as some would like.
• http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Evolution.html - "Evolvability", one of Tim Berners-Lee's design issues that explores the relationship between human- and machine-readable specifications.

Historic documents

• http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html - Tim Berners-Lee's original 1989 CERN proposal for creating a web of information. Looking back, the foresight it contains, especially with respect to linked data, is quite remarkable:
  • "Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything."
  • "Keywords are a common method of accessing data for which one does not have the exact coordinates. The usual problem with keywords, however, is that two people never chose the same keywords. The keywords then become useful only to people who already know the application well."
  • "In 1980, I wrote a program ... so the list of links is more important than the text on the node itself. Note that each link has a type ("includes" for example) and may also have comment associated with it."
  • "Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination."
  • "If we provide access to existing databases as though they were in hypertext form, the system will get off the ground quicker"
  • "An intriguing possibility, given a large hypertext database with typed links, is that it allows some degree of automatic analysis."