Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 49

deploy becomes nearly insurmountable. Obviously, if an agent is trying to convey
some sense, then it should minimally choose a language to encode that sense which
is capable of conveying that sense. Yet as the same sense can be conveyed by
different languages, what language to choose?
The Principle of Least-Power is a common-sense engineering solution to this
problem of language choice. The solution is simply to build first a common core
language that fulfills the minimal requirements to communicate whatever sense one
wishes to communicate, and then extend this core language. Using HTML as an
example, one builds first a common core of useful features such as the ability to
have text be bold and have images inserted in general areas of the text, and then as
the technology matures, to slowly add features such as the precise positioning of
images and the ability to specify font size. The Principle of Least Power allows a
straightforward story about compatibility to be built to honor the “be strict when
sending and tolerant when receiving” maxim of the Internet, since it makes the
design of a new version an exercise in strictly extending the previous version of
the language (Carpenter 1996). A gaping hole in the middle of the Principle of
Least Power is that there is no consistent definition of the concept of 'power,' and
the W3C TAG seems to conflate power with the Chomsky Hierarchy. However, the
problem of defining 'power' formally must be left as an open research question.

2.4 Conclusions

The Web, while to a large extent being an undisciplined and poorly-defined space,
does contain a set of defining terms and principles. While previously these terms and
principles have been scattered throughout various informal notes, IETF RFCs, and
W3C Recommendations, in this chapter we have systematized both the terminology
and the principles in a way that reveals how they internally build off each other.
In general, when we are referring to the hypertext Web , we are referring to the use
of URIs and links to access hypertext web-pages using HTTP . Yet there is more to
the Web than hypertext. The next question is how can these principles be applied
to domains outside the hypertext Web, and this will be the topic of Chap. 3 as we
apply these principles to the Semantic Web, a knowledge representation language
for the Web.