"Zope-certified Python Engineers" [was: Java and Python]

[A.M. Kuchling]

In article <mailman.1016822075.17058.python-list at python.org>, 
	Laura Creighton wrote:
> One days reading of your weeks spam will yield you many offers of
> programs and advice on how to make your website rise in the Google
> ranking.  This reflects the reality that once you have made it to the

Rule #1 when dealing with spam: Spammers lie.  I doubt any of those
offers would actually result in any useful information or visible
effect on your ranking.  Absent Scientology-scale creation of fake
links, the only way is to update your site often and to get other
people to link to you.

> EBay has one sort of approach.  So does Advogato (see http://advogato.org ).
> It is a real problem and one that interests me a lot.

At the Web services panel at Python10, Tim Berners-Lee mourned that
third-party Web annotation tools such as crit.org or the commercial
Third Voice have never really caught on.  Probably this is because, as
he suggested, the UI would be really complicated, because we already
have the technical pieces needed.

Consider your example of a buggy formula on a Web page.  Perhaps
someone has noted this error on some annotation service, but on which
one?  The W3C's?  crit.org?  The American Mathematical Society?  You
probably can't just pick one for the whole Web, because the AMS
annotations probably don't comment on X-Files Web pages much (or
particularly well).  Instead you'd need a complex set of preferences
-- use the AMS for mathematical pages, use the MEMS Exchange for
MEMS-related pages, and so forth.  

This quickly gets really messy.  Who annotates a finite-element
analysis of a MEMS structure?  Both services, or just one?  And how do
you tell if a page is mathematical, anyway?  Or will I constantly
telling my browser which service to use for each URL, in a
never-ending task.  (You could have a annotation service that just
classified pages, of course.) 

A widely adopted solution would bring us much closer to Ted Nelson's
vision of a hyperlinked repository of all knowledge, but getting there
seems very, very difficult.

--amk                                                             (www.amk.ca)
Beware the devious Calib. One day he'll get so cunning even he won't
know what he's planning.
    -- Leela, in "The Face of Evil"