I'd like to raise an issue that crossed my mind when it should have been occupied with sleep last night.
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. I think it safe to say that the concept of Hypertext precedes the WWW.
I believe it was introduced around 1947 by Vanevar Bush. No doubt someone will claim Lewis Carroll or somesuch dreamt it up. Personally, I think they got it wrong, since much of the Web is now about things other than text. Berners-Lee actually tried to rename HTML at one stage, but it was too late.
I often find something on the WWW that I want to print off and read away from the computer. Sometimes this isn't easy, particularly if a document is spread across more than one HTML file (as sometimes happens with papers presented at electronic conferences).
This was discussed at length at WWW-1 in CERN in May 1994. The concept of the linked document was supposed to add structure to the design. Its never really been implemented, but that does not mean it has not been thought about. Hyper-G is a server that also attempts to add this stucture, ie "document clusters" rather than individual files which may or may not be hyperlinked to eachother.
These issues possibly apply more to resources such as journals than they do to some other applications, but:
How 'ready' is the scientific community to change the way it approaches 'written' texts?
How prepared is the scientific community to glean information from a computer screen and not worry about having a hard copy?
more to the point, will the electronic version still be around in 2 never mind 20 or 200 years URNs were supposed to address this, but they may not happen for a few years yet. Dr Henry Rzepa, Department of Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; rzepa@ic.ac.uk via Eudora Pro 2.1.3; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. World-Wide Web URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)