I'm catching up on e-mail as my flight is delayed in O'Hare and came across the following tidbit about Slate Magazine in the latest Edupage mailing:
Although the magazine only recently achieved break-even status on revenue of about $6 million per year, Slate won a National Magazine Award for its editorial content, and mainstream news organizations frequently cite it. The publication is also given credit for shaping Web publishing and introducing the use of hyperlinks and Web logs.
(Emphasis mine.)
Am I reading that right? Edupage wants me to believe that Slate is responsible for introducing hyperlinks to the world?
I'm having a very, very hard time believing that.
Am I alone?
[Posted the next morning after a good sleep at my sister's house.]
Posted by jzawodn at December 23, 2004 07:22 AM
(Obligatory) It's true, and Al Gore invented the Internet!
Tim Berners Lee will be really upset to know that one publication thinks that Slate 'introduced' concept of hyperlinks. ;)
JD
Tim Berners Lee will be really upset to know that one publication thinks that Slate 'introduced' concept of hyperlinks. ;)
JD
Tim Berners Lee will be really upset to know that one publication thinks that Slate 'introduced' concept of hyperlinks. ;)
JD
Oops, I am sorry for posting this multiple times! My browser was timing out and I hit post couple of times!
Please delete the duplicate posts.
JD
They are pointing out that corporations that publish web content do not do hyperlinks, so Slate might be unusual in that regard. One may ask why a newsspaper's web site, when it vaguely describes a primary source, does not link to it. It does not want anyone to go to the primary source, or leave their site.
The branding of commercial web sites means they do not link out of their "branded space".
This is why I am getting more news from, for example, wikipedia. Nobody on wikipedia hesitates to link to primary sources. Actually, it is encouraged.
1980
While consulting for CERN June-December of 1980, Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", which allows links to be made betwen arbitrary nodes. Each node had a title, a type, and a list of bidirectional typed links. "ENQUIRE" ran on Norsk Data machines under SINTRAN-III. See: Enquire user manual as scanned images or as HTML page(alt).
Source:
http://www.w3.org/History.html
of course they're talking about hyperlinks in online newspapers
No you are not alone and it never ceases to astonish me how such things get published. Historical revisiniosim is alive and well online.
I feel that there are two mistakes here. The first one is that introducing is not inventing. I think that the author was trying to communicate that Slate was one of the first internet sites to propagate the use of hyperlinks.
The second mistake (or the first chronologically) was in the author's terse commentary. If the author had been a little more wordy in this statement, it would have been easier to understand his intended message.
> The first one is that introducing is not inventing.
An unqualified introducing is. "Introducing the use of hyperlinks on news websites" isn't inventing, not that Slate did that either. "Introducing the use of hyperlinks" alone *is* inventing, or at the very least groundbreaking in a way that Slate most definitely wasn't.
> I think that the author was trying to communicate that Slate was one of the first internet sites to propagate the use of hyperlinks.
Then it's absolutely amazing that the author is so misinformed. The whole concept of the WWW revolves around using hyperlinks. Practically every website in existence uses them.
If they introduced hyperlinks, wouldn't that mean that nobody could use 'em?
After all, if nobody before Slate used hyperlinks, why would the browsers support them?
For crying out loud, It's HyperText Markup Language - meaning the whole thing is built around hyperlinks!
I think (I'm hoping, rather) the author was speaking of something other than the standard hyperlinks...but I've got no clue what. Can't be internal links - how else would you get around? Can't be external links, because that's the primary point of hyperlinks - to create a "Web" of information spanning across sites, domains, people, yadda ...
*Shrug* Hellifiknow.
British Telecom claimed in 2000 that it owned the patent to hyperlinking after putting in the patent request in 1976 which was granted in 1979.
They lost the ruling against Prodigy though
http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D02NYSC/02-07733.PDF
