The commonplace use of permalinks in weblogs has profound implications.
At a recent tech discussion Mark Nottingham pointed out that the real difference between RSS and RDF (the cornerstone of the semantic web initiative) was that RSS was about lists.
On the one hand this is true, however, the term list understates a crucial point about weblogging. Weblogging is designed to deal with nuggets of information that an author creates instead of a page that a publisher publishes. A permalink refers to a unique item, and in terms of the semantic web, indicates a component from which meaning can be extracted. more…
In this context a page is irrelevant, weblog pages are transient things, but entries are made permanent through archiving. The difference between weblog publishing and most other web publishing tools is that traditional tools have been geared around producing pages, whereas the application servers and databases that sit behind large sites are more naturally geared around ‘nuggets of information’. This is not limited to publishing programs – consider the stats packages which analyze web logs (as opposed to weblogs), by not giving statistics about individual ‘postings’ they are essentially tied to extracting potentially meaningless information about page hits.
So what are the limitations of permalinks as they are currently implemented:
1. they are too conservative in that they reside on (but don’t point to) a portion of a web page. It should be possible to set the not merely the number of items or duration of time displayed on a weblog, but to set the page size so that a weblog item can be a portion of a web page, all of a web page or spanning several web pages, thus covering all of the options. This is rather like the ‘more…’ function of this posting but covering a page instead of an individual item. This would then allow weblogging tools to be used to publish things like conventional news websites.
2. Other links like comments and trackback are creeping in – they are very necessary additions to weblogging but they should be part of the permalink.
i.e. forgetting technical limitations but concentrating on the best possible interface, imagine clicking on a permalink takes you to an archived item, at the bottom is a space for comments and a check box that allows you to post you comments to your own weblog, pinging this one in doing so. A list of comments, both locally and remotely is listed below the item text. This would effectively combine trackback with permalinks, it would link semantic units of information in a semantic web-like manner.