The web

I’ve been busy writing agents for retreiving and parsing data in many different formats from many different sources the last couple of weeks. These agents fetch data for the Swedish city portal (actually almost 50 portals) that we are working on. The data sources are a big mess of free text, HTML, weird XML formats and CSV. PHP 5 is a wonderful language to work with when creating these agents.

Today I stumbled upon a quote I had written down many years ago from the science fiction book The Childgarden written by Geoff Ryman and published early in 1994. Great book, great writer. The quote doesn’t really talk about the web as we know it but it felt so right.

“Below that, there’s the Web, That’s the memory. That’s where everything is stored, and the Web is a real mess. You can get tangled up in it.“