Re: Resiliency To New Data Requirements

From: Marshall <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com>
Date: 15 Aug 2006 20:23:15 -0700
Message-ID: <1155698595.475758.261530_at_p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com>


dawn wrote:

>

> Maybe a little, but the www is still a very large distributed database
> of sorts.

It totally isn't. What makes up a database? Structure, integrity, manipulation to start with. HTTP+HTML has *none* of those, let alone more advanced things we might consider part of a dbms.

> It has structured data (in spite of what others might call
> it),

No it doesn't. It has markup. Markup is not structure; there is no schema. If HTML is structured data, then troff is structured data. No schema: no structure. The level of things you can do with HTML are: put this word in bold.

There's no DML. There isn't even a query language. GET is not a query language. There are no integrity rules.

HTTP+HTML doesn't even remotely qualify as a data management system. It's a distributed document retrieval system. They are not the same thing. I'm not even sure on what basis one could claim they were related.

> persisted on secondary storage devices, accessed by people.

If this is your definition, then 3x5 cards is data management.

> There isn't a great query langauge, I'll grant.

There isn't *any* query language. Retrieving a document by a key isn't a query language. It's a cheapo function call.

> The requirements are not
> identical to those of a DBMS, but the model for the data ought to be
> taken seriously and moved forward accordingly.

No, it shouldn't. There is no data model to take seriously. Efforts to retrofit one have been embarrassing. If we want to do data management, and we are studying HTML+HTTP, then we should consider it a negative example.  

Marshall Received on Wed Aug 16 2006 - 05:23:15 CEST

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