John Battelle riffs about an interface to models and information about the human body. We are all used to rich interfaces to geographic information now, thanks to Google Earth and MSFT's Virtual Earth. However, I'm still amazed, flabbergasted even, that our we browsers don't understand documents. This is partly the fault of HTML, which is too limited and has to be hijacked if one is to present a rich document experience akin to that which we see encoded in PDF files. I can understand that there is a desire to leverage a simple information asymmetry - I mean, if we knew which parts were adverts, which were navigation and which were content, then perhaps we would do something about what we see. That being said, the fact that one can't work with tables, lists, headlines, etc. in a browser, e.g. to select parts of the document with a simple cut and paste action, is beyond me.
Sometimes I feel like I wish the web would freeze while we could catch up to its potential...
Are you referring to the fact that the text isn't structured in such a way (like in an XML) on all web pages so we can identify the data?
Posted by: Giovanni Gallucci | September 28, 2007 at 10:22 PM