Analog by Night

Note: I realize that this analysis is deeply premature, but the thought struck me and I wanted to roll with it at the moment.

So, I’m reading the most delightfully nerdy and religious and thick essay I’ve read in a while. It’s actually only a few days old. Which belies that I am actually several months in the the weeds.” It is eloquently titled: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One – W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004. I’m on section 2.2.1, a short and tight section on the meaning and principle of URI’s. The document is constructed brilliantly like a study sheet replete with blocked of factoids like:

Constraint: URIs Identify a Single Resource :Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources.

So I pour over that for a minute. It tastes like a little commandment. I like it. It feels comforting like a big hand on your shoulder turning you away from the wide and sinful path. Do this!

Of course the meat of the statement is about singularity. URIs Identify a Single Resource They admit it is a constraint right off. Ok, I’m ready. And they sandwich, they HIDE, that harshly impossible truth between a warning, and a statement which is emasculated in it’s ambiguity. The last bit, (Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources.) is like some pale, limp identity statement. A is not B. Thanks.

So.. um… what about streams? Dynamic content? blogs? Clearly the nature of the modern web development and culture is dynamic. Not static; it has to change! That last statement allows dynamic resources to satisfy it by not really addressing the dimension of time. By being somewhat one dimensional. But the middle statement really says something.

Let me be more clear, that this little signpost factoid is not just a summation of the elaborated principle that precedes it in the paper, but actually a kind of argument itself.

Here’s the breakdown:

1. Constraint:
2. URIs Identify a Single Resource
3. Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources

One and two are inline, cojoining them. But one has to acknowledge that they are separated by a colon. Which indicates hierarchy. It’s necessary punctuation, but it is not insignificant. That’s why it serves to separate them and analyze the effect of that hierarchization. The effect is that of directive. Usage of the word in it’s position serves to contain and soften the effect of the summarization.

Seriously it’s the summarized, framed and colored little axiom that you’re really going to remember anyway. So they tell you early on that these will be prefaced and broken into groups. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredibly conservative and well structured document, but I think subtextual analysis yields a character which is worth remarking. Those groups are: Principle, Good Practice notes, and Contstraint. Their intended (read ‘constructed’) meaning is detailed here: 1.1.3. Principles, Constraints, and Good Practice Notes.

Ok, back to the point of the post. The question is presented again: How can a URI satisfy that second part? The subtitle, “URIs Identify a single resource,” asks for singularity and that sounds static to me. This forces “resource” into a broader, more open meaning which has to include streams, dynamic pages and even apps, which change. A message is singular, and the word resource broadens the declaration to suggest a ‘place’ or space for multiple messages.

Consider a blog. On it’s first day it may contain one message, one post, one identifiable, static, element, and the next day it may contain a second. At any given examination the total surveyable message has changed. The messages are multiplicitous, and they utility exists for this purpose. The home pages of the past never implied any tendency one way or the other. They were free to be homesteads, and still are, or to be agoras, where an albeit circuitous labyrinth of indentifiable yet static messages may exist. But the blog, and any other resource delivered by PHP, CGI, ASP, or any other scripting/dynamic system force the definition of URI into a broader flora of interfaces with multiple message capability.

So the qualifiers “Identify” and “single” resource create an ideological conflict of arbitrarity which of course is characteristic of the web we experience. It is a space, and we represent it that way in our common language. We don’t say “turn to this section of the web” we say “go to this website” Spatial, it’s spatial. Home, city, highway, are not resources nor does it make much sense to describe them as single.

We are deeply encouraged by our logical history to categorize our world in terms of items, but comeon, when we look at anything long enough we come to realize that items are simply the borders of another collection of smaller items. We go back and forth from describing our world as things and spaces where things are. The web, cyberspace, you choose, but to be honest to what we know now, and with credit to this new morphological perspective of reality, our world (especially our informational world) is more accurately described in four dimensions or more rather than three. The willingness to extend our definitions into multidimensionality (look at the usage of the word ‘orthogonal’) requires that we acknowledge two things about our knowledge:

1. Boundaries are arbitrary, and serve a basic need however incomplete
2. Meaning crosses boundaries, ie meaning changes; contigent it’s presentation

We have been in period for quite sometime, of imposing this layered view of reality. Whether you see a diamond, or a collection of carbon molecules, or a very rare event points explicitly to a world-view. The ‘rare event’ model includes all four dimensions, and therefore provides the more complete model.

Perhaps the LIS oriented documentophiles should reconsider the language of these documents towards a more spatial ideology. This observation and subsequent suggestion extends from the motivation towards the more complete model, however evolving this model is. Admittedly a model that includes the idea of recurrence of form would be even more progressive, but I do not think we are ideologically quite prepared to admit the reality of recurrence for lack of historical documentation of it definitively. Essentially this is a suggested modernization of terminology to reflect more accurately the world we experience and merely recalls other phenomenological, semiotic, and epistemological arguments.

To conclude, if our worldview, and the surge of temporality inclusive terminology into the common set of reality qualifiers is sufficient for the modern discussion concerning materials, society and innovation, it should extend to the discussion and definitions, however suggestive or declarative, of our informational experience as well.

Note: I realize that this analysis is deeply premature, but the thought struck me and I wanted to roll with it at the moment.

So, I’m reading the most delightfully nerdy and religious and thick essay I’ve read in a while. It’s actually only a few days old. Which belies that I am actually several months in the the weeds.” It is eloquently titled: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One – W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004. I’m on section 2.2.1, a short and tight section on the meaning and principle of URI’s. The document is constructed brilliantly like a study sheet replete with blocked of factoids like:

Constraint: URIs Identify a Single Resource :Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources.

So I pour over that for a minute. It tastes like a little commandment. I like it. It feels comforting like a big hand on your shoulder turning you away from the wide and sinful path. Do this!

Of course the meat of the statement is about singularity. URIs Identify a Single Resource They admit it is a constraint right off. Ok, I’m ready. And they sandwich, they HIDE, that harshly impossible truth between a warning, and a statement which is emasculated in it’s ambiguity. The last bit, (Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources.) is like some pale, limp identity statement. A is not B. Thanks.

So.. um… what about streams? Dynamic content? blogs? Clearly the nature of the modern web development and culture is dynamic. Not static; it has to change! That last statement allows dynamic resources to satisfy it by not really addressing the dimension of time. By being somewhat one dimensional. But the middle statement really says something.

Let me be more clear, that this little signpost factoid is not just a summation of the elaborated principle that precedes it in the paper, but actually a kind of argument itself.

Here’s the breakdown:

1. Constraint:
2. URIs Identify a Single Resource
3. Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources

One and two are inline, cojoining them. But one has to acknowledge that they are separated by a colon. Which indicates hierarchy. It’s necessary punctuation, but it is not insignificant. That’s why it serves to separate them and analyze the effect of that hierarchization. The effect is that of directive. Usage of the word in it’s position serves to contain and soften the effect of the summarization.

Seriously it’s the summarized, framed and colored little axiom that you’re really going to remember anyway. So they tell you early on that these will be prefaced and broken into groups. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredibly conservative and well structured document, but I think subtextual analysis yields a character which is worth remarking. Those groups are: Principle, Good Practice notes, and Contstraint. Their intended (read ‘constructed’) meaning is detailed here: 1.1.3. Principles, Constraints, and Good Practice Notes.

Ok, back to the point of the post. The question is presented again: How can a URI satisfy that second part? The subtitle, “URIs Identify a single resource,” asks for singularity and that sounds static to me. This forces “resource” into a broader, more open meaning which has to include streams, dynamic pages and even apps, which change. A message is singular, and the word resource broadens the declaration to suggest a ‘place’ or space for multiple messages.

Consider a blog. On it’s first day it may contain one message, one post, one identifiable, static, element, and the next day it may contain a second. At any given examination the total surveyable message has changed. The messages are multiplicitous, and they utility exists for this purpose. The home pages of the past never implied any tendency one way or the other. They were free to be homesteads, and still are, or to be agoras, where an albeit circuitous labyrinth of indentifiable yet static messages may exist. But the blog, and any other resource delivered by PHP, CGI, ASP, or any other scripting/dynamic system force the definition of URI into a broader flora of interfaces with multiple message capability.

So the qualifiers “Identify” and “single” resource create an ideological conflict of arbitrarity which of course is characteristic of the web we experience. It is a space, and we represent it that way in our common language. We don’t say “turn to this section of the web” we say “go to this website” Spatial, it’s spatial. Home, city, highway, are not resources nor does it make much sense to describe them as single.

We are deeply encouraged by our logical history to categorize our world in terms of items, but comeon, when we look at anything long enough we come to realize that items are simply the borders of another collection of smaller items. We go back and forth from describing our world as things and spaces where things are. The web, cyberspace, you choose, but to be honest to what we know now, and with credit to this new morphological perspective of reality, our world (especially our informational world) is more accurately described in four dimensions or more rather than three. The willingness to extend our definitions into multidimensionality (look at the usage of the word ‘orthogonal’) requires that we acknowledge two things about our knowledge:

1. Boundaries are arbitrary, and serve a basic need however incomplete
2. Meaning crosses boundaries, ie meaning changes; contigent it’s presentation

We have been in period for quite sometime, of imposing this layered view of reality. Whether you see a diamond, or a collection of carbon molecules, or a very rare event points explicitly to a world-view. The ‘rare event’ model includes all four dimensions, and therefore provides the more complete model.

Perhaps the LIS oriented documentophiles should reconsider the language of these documents towards a more spatial ideology. This observation and subsequent suggestion extends from the motivation towards the more complete model, however evolving this model is. Admittedly a model that includes the idea of recurrence of form would be even more progressive, but I do not think we are ideologically quite prepared to admit the reality of recurrence for lack of historical documentation of it definitively. Essentially this is a suggested modernization of terminology to reflect more accurately the world we experience and merely recalls other phenomenological, semiotic, and epistemological arguments.

To conclude, if our worldview, and the surge of temporality inclusive terminology into the common set of reality qualifiers is sufficient for the modern discussion concerning materials, society and innovation, it should extend to the discussion and definitions, however suggestive or declarative, of our informational experience as well.