Draft Treaty On Links

[Mark S. Miller <mark>]

Date: Fri, 27 Oct 89 14:13:54 PDT
   From: marcs (Marc Stiegler)

   2) User annoyance because multiple copies of the "same" link 
   are appearing in his link pane (roger is pretty sure this is 
   easily fixed, so that only one copy of the link appears in the 
   list; I hope so).

Roger is right.  There are several available notions of "same" such
that multiple instances of the "same" link can take just one line on
the link-list display.  The two that come immediately to mind are: the
links have the same link-id, and the links are actually equal
according to a version compare of their orgls.  Note that the first is
guaranteed to be cheap, and the second will almost always actually be
cheap (although this isn't guaranteed).  When selecting this line on
the Link-list display, presumably the front-end will give the user a
choice of which of the documents-on-the-other-side to go to.  

Note that first class links do not make the need to support this extra
complexity of interaction go away.  In our famous "A(N)" example, were
the links first class, the Bert Context of the link would
unambiguously be A1.  I haven't heard anyone yet suggest that "A1" is
the right choice of default in this scenario. To my mind, the scenario
argues even more strongly against first-class links than it does
against embedded links.

Btw, I suggest a terminology change in the Link Debates:  Instead of
first-class vs embedded, what we are really arguing about is which
document to embed a link in under what circumstances.  We are not
actually arguing about *whether* to embed every link in some document.
I think that rewiring our brains around this alternative formulation
may clear things up.