Global description of the project
This comparison goes beyond just contrasting lianas and hyperlinks. While the Amazonian forest is victim of man, and is actually diminishing in size, the WWW information forest keeps growing and evolving at an almost frightening speed. But nobody actually sees it grow, except very locally.
This jungle has nevertheless its maps, called What's New..., On FAQ..., About..., NCSA Starting Points, CUI W3 Catalog, World Wide Web FAQs and Guides, Internet Starting Points, Internet Resources Meta-Index, and many more. It also has its guides (JumpStation, The Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides, ALIWEB, etc.) that can bring you to places that are of potential interest to you. These tools are quite useful, but they are not always available and are generally unable to keep up with the rapid growth of the giant.
An interesting aspect of this "creature" is its ability to generate phantom trees, called indexes. These phantom trees look like real trees and can bear their own lianas that will transport the traveller to new locations, whether real or virtual. The lianas leading to such imaginary trees are in no way different from other lianas leading to actual trees. These indexes appear as if they were real documents, but they are nowhere to be found, as is, on a physical medium. These documents are created on the spot whenever a link referring to them is activated.
This special form of virtual reality in the world of information is a very powerful concept, as it allows information providers to furnish more than just bare information or facts. They can indeed seamlessly make available a whole world of objects and processes, as long as they can give these processes the appearance of regular documents. Pushing this line of reasoning to its limits, WWW can be considered as a remote display interface that can connect remote users to various applications made available to them all over the world. Some have already taken the plunge, like Paul Burchard, from the Geometry Center, University of Minnesota, with his W3Kit Object Library for Interactive WWW Applications.
The use of the web is thus extending from simply sharing (mostly read-only) information and running search engines, to automatically taking orders, and now, to running remote applications/simulations.
Actually, what characterizes the essence of the World-Wide Web is its http protocol. What is around it, that is, server and client applications, can vary widely. Of course, NCSA's Mosaic viewer and httpd server daemon, or CERN's server are the most well known representatives, but a WWW server does not need to access documents to produce information, and a client does not need to display on a computer screen the information it gets. The cohesion factor between these very dissimilar components is the "language" they talk, i.e. the http protocol.
Global description of the project