[ih] The web as wind and whirlwind? (was Re: History from 1960s to 2025)

[Karl Auerbach]

On 12/18/25 6:52 AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote:
> Or, to think of this another way, if the web had worked by 
> distributing copies of data around the Internet, and that data were 
> somehow fetched through addresses that came from (say) cryptographic 
> tokens identifying the content in some sort of grand Dewey decimal (or 
> LC, I don't care the version!) catalogue of information

One direction that I wish had been followed, but was not, was to pursue 
the idea of, if I remember correctly, Marshal Rose and Carl Malamud, to 
use tagging (they used XML) to attach a meaning tag to nest-able content 
elements of US Securities and Exchange (SEC) documents.

It would have been a pain to write, but vastly useful to consumers, had 
things like this been followed:

<name><firstname>John</><lastname>Doe</></>

Now we have massive "intelligent" engines that are trying to attempt 
(with errors) to reverse engineer meaning out of untagged content

         --karl--