say
parallel processing : arts
::
serial processing : sciences
science blindly following
a narrow incremental logical/verbal path
while art makes grand intuitive leaps
on the basis of
rich broad spatial imaginings
even the poet's words
individually reset
into the space of sounds
the novelist's
into the space of everyday life
[amble]
for the semantic web to work
someone (or some group)
has to come up with a
finite controlled vocabulary that captures
a significant portion of the
important meanings
on the web
and their intent
for microformats
is to break that task down
into manageable subtasks
by attacking
one domain of meaning
at a time
but they're having to confront
the paradox that every domain
is unruly
with a shifting core
of most-important themes
and an infinitely attenuating halo
of subordinate variations
that quickly nudge microformats
towards 'macro' territory
for which pathology i'll propose
an antidote in the form
of heraldic barcodes
that graphically/visually
symbolically/iconically
intuitively/flexibly
summarise a domain
using three principal layers:
- a narrow frame of varying thickness and color
- a background pattern
- a foreground icon
and for my
test/example/domain
i'll choose (ambitiously)
webpagetypes
with heraldicbarcode backgroundpatterns
that symbolically schematise
the distribution of info on the page
simple text as a block of grey
(embedded media colored by filetype)
a heterogeneous list
as a stack of colored bars
(narrow topical range =
narrow spectrum of colors)
uniform list-granularity =
uniform bar-size
ordering principles for lists
(alphabetical newest-1st best-1st
rhetorical didactic ontological)
indicated somehow
one edgerow of icon pixels
could be a logarithmic timeline/changelog
1st pixel = 1992-2000 (8yrs)
(black until the page's creation)
2nd = 2000-2004, 3rd = 2004-2005, 4th 2006
5th 6mos 6th 3mos 7th 45days 8th 20days
9th 10 10th 5 11th 2 12th 1
major/minor content changes
(or even changes of url)
differentiated by color
other edgerows possibly capturing
pageweight, % cruft
topical breadth, completeness, necessity
and finally a foreground icon
shaped to represent the primary
(range of) topic(s):
tech news, celeb gossip, etc
(with colorfill representing... what?)
[microformat]
and if some of this
proves less valuable
than other missing dimensions
one should
feel
this
in the belly
and tweaks should almost suggest themselves
formfields:
page-age
page-weight
% cruft
topical scope
completeness
necessity
revision-frequency
revision-intensity
revision-patterns
% original text
% copied/quoted text
% new images/audio/video/code
% copied ditto
# custom links
# link sources
granularity
ordering
.
