"hypertext"

Just a quick note to try to shake up some of the preconceived notions
of what "hypertext" is or isn't.

"Hypertext" is roughly what you get when all of your distributed objects
have a single method which means "give me your state" (i.e. pickling,
serialization).  So rather than an object representing a stock quote
with an interface with methods such as getCurrent, getOpen, etc..  you
have a single method (GET) which returns a representation of the full
state of the object, e.g.

<quote symbol="foo">
 <current>12.5</current>
 <open>12.25</open>
</quote>

So it doesn't in any way constrain what can be represented (all
objects can be pickled).  Nor does it constrain the consumer of that
information to requiring a human process it (that depends on the
specific form of serialization; HTML for humans, RDF/XML for
machines).  It only constrains the way in which the information is
made available; through a generic method invoked upon an object
identified by a URI.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               [email protected]
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com