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Ruben Verborgh

Chapter 6 – Affordance

Serendipitous Web Applications through Semantic Hypermedia

The Web has made information actionable. For centuries, books and essays have been referring to each other; hypertext has turned those references into links that actually lead us to the other place. In order to scale globally, the Web had to limit the flexibility of links: they point in one direction and can only be created by the publisher of information. Our actions on a webpage remain constrained to those determined by its publisher. As ad-hoc interactions between different online applications become crucial, a linking model that allows a user-centered set of actions seems more appropriate.

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