On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Jordan Reiter wrote:
> At 2:25 AM -0500 07-21-1997, Jon Knight wrote:
> >
> >How about the classic Fiction and Non-Fiction. Many paper libraries have
> >just that split.
> No, no, no, no, no! How dare we do that kind of thing? Besides, since
> most of the material we will be dealing with are webpages dealing with
> information (be it personal, or corporate), most webpages would want
> themselves to be "non-fiction". Certainly if they want to seem credible,
If I physically pick up a book and open it, most fiction has
a disclaimer "this is a work of fiction". If I write a story for my kids
and publish it on the Web, or something, I have no problem with
tagging it fiction. I can see that White Aryan Supremacists or
Creation Scientists might have a problem ...
Although there is other work going on about "trust" and resources
(PEP ?), I think it might be useful in the Web/search engine paradigm
to be able to filter up front on what kind of thing one is talking
about (TYPE) - fiction/nonfiction, book/journal/magazine/mail archive,
whether one can deal with it (FORMAT) - JPEG, VRML2, audio/video etc.,
whether one can read it (LANGUAGE) ... Hmm, I guess one could use
the HTTP Transparent Content Negotiation to deal with the last
two for you ... except most browsers currently send "Accept: */*" ..
I guess the problem with search engines is that they give you a link
into the middle of something. If you found it in an edited list, you'd
already know if it was fiction, creation science etc. before you
got it.
Andrew Daviel
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