The Document Ecology
The World Wide Web is the “universe of network-accessible information” [Tim Berners-Lee, 1996]
- Openness and Content-Neutrality of Documents
- HTTP can adapt to any document format
- URL can represent links to any document format, from within many
- “Natural Selection” Favors a Few Document Formats
- Preferential adoption of SGML, CSS, HTML, and now XML
- Each embodies the evolutionary strategy of parsimony
Evolution: Capture Info --> Represent Knowledge
- Can leverage Web reflexively to capture structure and semantics
- XML-based document formats represent an ecosystem of interdependent (rather than competing) document “species”