Researcher Salon with Dorian Taylor| Retrofitting the Web

TalkDorian TaylorNovember 23, 2023

Dorian Taylor presents 'Intertwiler,' his Summer of Protocols project to build a hypermedia engine that fixes the web's broken transclusion, unstable URLs, and one-directional linking by treating links and resources as typed, first-class objects governed by open protocols rather than proprietary software. Drawing on decades of personal history—from 1990s BBS art scenes and dot-com personal websites to Ted Nelson's hypertext theory, Horst Rittel's issue-based information systems, and Christopher Alexander's design theory—Taylor argues that most information systems fail because they try to contain all information internally rather than defining interoperable conventions, and demonstrates a live (buggy) prototype using RDF, RDFa, and XSLT to achieve seamless, protocol-based content transclusion.

Topics

component-content-management-systems fiction issue-based-information-systems-ibis protocols research researcher-salon stable-urls-content-addressing technology transclusion typed-links-and-resources-semantic-webrdfa

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