Do you not find it at least curious that your point is that HTTP wasn't developed until 1990, but we've already established that CompuServe was selling airline tickets online by 1985?
Are you seizing on the phrase "WWW" or "Web" so literally? Do you not perhaps think that as in most things technical, the writer didn't use the exact, precise, technically accurate phrase to describe what existed prior to today's internet experience for the average user?
Sheesh, Bert, you're beginning to argue like John Willkie. John----- Original Message ----- From: "Albert Manfredi" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, February 04, 2010 8:58 PM Subject: [opendtv] Re: Another point of view on walled gardens
John Shutt wrote:Do you notice the sequence of events in the article? AOL users only saw AOL content, and CompuServe users only saw CompuServe content (although many companies had duplicate content on both systems.) Then the World Wide Web became an open platform.I saw what the article was saying the first time around, but I disagreed with that description. I specifically disagree with "then the WWW became an open platform."The WWW, which runs HTTP over TCP/IP, was conceived from day 1 as an open platform. HTTP was developed at CERN in 1990, and the first RFC describing this CERN protocol, HTTP v1.0, was published in 1996 (RFC 1945).Here's the way RFC 1945 describes it. Tell me whether any of this sounds like a walled system:"HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. This specification reflects common usage of the protocol referred too [sic] as 'HTTP/1.0'. This specification describes the features that seem to be consistently implemented in most HTTP/1.0 clients and servers...."Practical information systems require more functionality than simple retrieval, including search, front-end update, and annotation. HTTP allows an open-ended set of methods to be used to indicate the purpose of a request. It builds on the discipline of reference provided by the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) [2], as a location (URL) [4] or name (URN) [16], for indicating the resource on which a method is to be applied. Messages are passed in a format similar to that used by Internet Mail [7] and the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) [5]."HTTP is also used as a generic protocol for communication between user agents and proxies/gateways to other Internet protocols, such as SMTP [12], NNTP [11], FTP [14], Gopher [1], and WAIS [8], allowing basic hypermedia access to resources available from diverse applications and simplifying the implementation of user agents."So, clearly the WWW, which used HTTP even before the web became the graphics-oriented scheme we know today, was conceived to be unwalled, leveraging from all the basic Internet protocols. It was AOL and Compuserve that walled off their own proprietary variants, giving their subscribers a distorted image of what the WWW really was. I remember talking to people who were totally confused about what the Internet was and what AOL was. They thought that AOL *was* the Internet.So, the way I would describe what is happening is that the WWW is being accessed from some very different devices these days, and some of these can only see a subset of what is actually there. Due to limitations in screen size or even unnecessary limitations in the apps they allow the user to install. And if anything, this fractured web seems MORE SIMILAR to what AOL and Compuserve had wrought on the Web back then.Bert _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469230/direct/01/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.
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