Ironick

Fertile Verge

Via Dion Hichcliffe comes Jeremy Geelan's great characterization of Web 2.0 as a Fertile Verge:

"Web 2.0" is an example of what the historian Daniel Boorstin would have called "the Fertile Verge" - "a place of encounter between something and something else." Boorstin (and here I am wholly indebted to Virginia Postrel) pinpointed such "verges" as being nothing short of the secret to American creativity.

Postrel sums up what Boorstin was saying as follows:

"A verge is not a sharp border but a frontier region: where the forest meets the prairie or the mountains meet the flatlands, where ecosystems or ideas mingle. Verges between land and sea, between civilization and wilderness, between black and white, between immigrants and natives...between state and national governments, between city and countryside - all mark the American experience."

The creativity of America, Boortsin argued - the hope of the nation - lies "in its verges, in its new mixtures and new confusions."

My point is that there is no boundary between "Web 1.0" and "Web 2.0" - just a blurry verge. And the richness of the verge lies in the cross-fertilization and new combinations they encourage.

This notion of the verge or the liminal is very popular with postmodernists. (I'm surprised Wikipedia doesn't refer to the postmodernist usage.) But my favorite observation regarding the fertility of the verge or the liminal is this one by Norbert Wiener in the introduction to his book Cybernetics:

There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electircal engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field. It is these boundary regions of science which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor. [emphasis added]

I think Wiener's observation is particularly apropos in the context of Web 2.0: much of the confusion is caused by the fact that "every single notion receives a separate name from each group".

Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State

In a recent comment thread on Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), someone asked for an explanation of the REST injunction to use "hypermedia as the engine of application state". For the source of the concept, see this section of Roy T Fielding's REST thesis. Since his explanation is difficult to follow the first time (at least it was for me), see Dave Orchard's discussion of the concept.

Here's one litmus test of whether an application is really hypermedia driven: is the XML (including XHTML) returned from a service call filled with identifiers (names) structured as URIs (e.g., http://www.acme.com/product/504382), or are the identifiers just strings (eg "504382"). If the latter, then it's unlikely that the application is designed to use hypermedia as the engine of application state.

In other words does the app become "part of the Web" or does it simply run "on top of" the Web 's transport and GUI. WOA is all about becoming part of the web by linking to resources via URIs. Delivering a Flash GUI module via HTTP is (usually) an example of merely running on top of the Web without becoming part of it.

Technorati Tags     WOA,REST,hypermedia

Amazing hack--The data: URL Scheme

In tracking down the documentation on Firefox's about: URI scheme (aka URL scheme), I came across the amazing data: scheme, which is an IETF standard. The data: scheme basically enables you to encode any element of an HTML page, or even the an entire HTML page itself, into a URI. In other words, data: enables you to directly embed a resource into web page, instead of linking to it. (Technically, the resource is embedded in the URI, but since the URI is embedded in the web page, it is for most purposes, the same thing.) Here is an example of a mini web site encoded in a URI. Look at the status bar of your browser to get a hint of what it looks like.

This hack reminds me of the javascript: scheme (aka javascript: protocol) which enables the very useful bookmarklet hacks. However, unlike data:, the javascript: scheme is not standard. One drawback is the limit on URI length, which appears to be about 4000 characters. The Wikipedia entry for data: links to some useful resources including the kitchen, which is how I created my demo encoded/embedded web page.

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