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Applied Web-systems Frameworks There are many different ways to skin a cat. When the cat is the worldwide web, the ways to approach web-systems development increases infinitely and then there is this thing called an information explosion and an information bottle-neck, especially when the principle rate determining factor is a lone middle-aged balding white man with a penchant for yarning. Imagine the possibilities. If an Internet warning system had been in place for the Tsunami last Christmas, perhaps many many lives might have been saved. This would be from a technical standpoint a fairly easy thing to implement. A single link to download. Updated information would be available at any site that has this link--the entire world could have been warned almost instantaneously, from a single location, at almost no expense or extra effort. So simple sounding the web system, so wonderful the prospects. Such a system could have been set up in any number of ways--a single web-page, a link, a set of sites, all more or less equally effective if not equally efficient, whatever. Then why didn't it happen this way? Such a system wouldn't have been technically difficult to put in place. It was perhaps only the human logistics of doing this that prevented its implementation before the fact of the Tsunami. In the first place, perhaps nobody thought of it beforehand, and if someone had thought of it, perhaps no one could be bothered enough to take the initiative to see it done. We have scarcely begun to imagine all the possibilities for the virtual vaporization of the suddenly unnecessary and obsolete anachronisms of our pre-Internet world. We can call it the disappearing global skyline of the future streamlining horizon. Can we exaggerate these possibilities? Hardly I think. Should we prescribe or proscribe how such systems are to be constructed? No, not at all. We are in a phase of early development when there is a premium to be gained from exploration and pioneering innovation. Of course, as with the preinstallation of an Internet-based Tsunami early warning system, the main set of obstacles to overcome are not technical, but human. The hardest thing to do on the web remains getting people together in a reliable and cooperative way. Judging by the flood of spam I receive everyday, it seems that the Internet brings out the worst in people and the worst of people before it brings out the best, and this tendency seems to be threatening, if not the freedom of the Internet, then at least its integrity and reliability in a fundamental sense. Perhaps this should be our main measure of the disparity between our technological advancement and progress and the relative lack of social innovation and human development in our world. Some of the ideological systems we must now contend with are not only from the Dark Ages, but even from Plato's Cave. I know now few more obvious or clearer senses of discrepancy between what is in our world and what easily might be sans the dogmas and prejudices of by-gone and obsolete modes of thinking and acting. So, it seems, by our very natures and tendencies to prevaricate and act in purely selfish ways, we threaten to destroy and bring down what may well prove to be the greatest achievement and boon to humankind that we have ever known. One of the central goals of web-systems development, it seems, will eventually be to provide a completely human-proof Internet. I would be inclined to call it "Hal." I imagine there is really some kind of trade-off going on between providing on one hand freedom of the Internet to do and say what we damn well please without fear of punishment or recrimination, and, on the other hand, to provide security measures on the web that protect us from the actions and words of others. I imagine there is a new breed of Internet Solicitor spawning who will be designed just for the purpose of negotiating and mediating this kind of conflict of interest. I don't think I can really underestimate the importance of the digital and Internet Information Revolution for humankind, nor what kind of achievement of human civilization this really represents for us collectively. When we look at the recent history of the Worldwide Web, we can say unequivocally that it is not only growing, but developing and even evolving in its own directions. The current rise in popularity of "Blogs" and the content management systems upon which they are based, of which there are many and many kinds, demonstrates a trend towards web-system integration and development toward greater modular automation. Wirelessness is another clear trend that has been silently occurring that will have a major impact on the distribution of networks as well as upon their functional automation as web-based systems. We do not yet know the full implications of the rise of electronic literacy. We must inquire what the implications will be for the organization of human knowledge in general and the development of the global knowledge landscape. Cultural and transcultural transmission will now be completely horizontal and "scale-free." The evolutionary development of the web, that demonstrates clear trends and general phases, must be seen as a process of exploration of the search-solution space created by the Internet and the possibilities engendered by the spread of electronic literacy. It strikes me that web-systems are moving in the direction of greater automation and programmability, and the line between structure and content in programming architectures is gradually becoming blurred in the sense that flow of control will become increasingly expressed in terms of natural language by the individual user. It strikes me that the growth of programming architectures in which control becomes increasingly embedded in systems beneath superstructures that are emergent with the introduction of revisions, updates and new programs, is generally headed in a direction that creates a more human and more intelligent interface that is increasingly user-friendly and more natural. At the same time, the problem of crossing cultural and linguistic boundaries is also slowly rolling back with the introduction of systems of automatic translation, etc, that are more effective. This process is clearly a corporate and social phenomenon. It is of a scale that no single person or company, for instance Bill Gates and Microsoft, can completely control or manipulate, though the potential for single nodal dominance of a system at one or a handful of points exists in such a scale-free network in the structure of the long run. What is evident though is that those who can clearly ascertain and comprehend the patterning and trend-lines of the developmental phases of the web and the Internet, will be in a position to achieve advantage within such a network. A general trend that I believe to be predictable is the streamlining of web-systems to a common general solution set regarding the transmission and control of information. This streamlining in the long run will demonstrate convergence to a common set of content management structures that will feature increasing automation and a natural human interface. |