Late Binding/Dynamic Linking (Was: NYT Article: Pornography Takes Over Financial Site for Children)

[Eric Hellman]

Builders of libraries on the internet need to learn what the on-line 
porn industry is teaching (the hard way)-

Linking in well-designed information systems is dynamic, not static.

Are you putting static links into your OPAC? Bad idea, and not just 
because of creeping porn. You need to put dynamic links there, 
dynamics links that you can control at time of use. URL's change, 
sometimes for good reasons, often for stupid reasons. You may want to 
change the url's yourself. You may wish to provide customized links, 
such as OpenURL links, or you may want just track the usage of links. 
To do any of this, you should point links at a redirecting link 
server that you control.

The publisher that sent out a CD-ROM with static links is up the 
proverbial creek. What they ought to have done is to have their links 
pointing at their own link server. If they had done that, they could 
have easily cut the connection as soon as they found out about the 
porn site. There are plenty of business reasons for doing this as 
well.

In computer science, the technique of fixing the link at the time of 
use rather than at the time of compilation is called "late binding". 
It is at the core of modern object oriented languages like Java.

Eric


At 6:14 AM -0700 10/26/01, treed at clearwater-fl.com wrote:
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>Content-Type: text/plain;
>	charsetso-8859-1"
>
>Happy Friday All!
>
>This NYT article pretty much says everything everyone has said on this issue
>before...but for kicks and giggles, I figured I'd pass it on anyway.  It's a
>pretty good read.
>
>-tracey
>
>
>
>"Visitors to a financial Web site for children this week were in for a
>shock: the math-and-money game they expected to find had been replaced by a
>pornography site.
>
>The money game, which is still accessible at Moneyopolis.com, was produced
>by Ernst & Young, the auditing and consulting company. An Ernst & Young
>spokesman, Kenneth Kerrigan, said the company had learned this week that
>pornographic images had been posted at an alternate Web address for the
>site, Moneyopolis.org, which has been under new ownership since this
>summer."
>
>Read more:
>  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/26/technology/26NET.html?todaysheadlines
-- 
Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
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