[alicebot-archcomm] Thank you Ernest Lergon. My thoughts on "Fetching Info from the Web"

[Gary Robertson]

Thanks Ernest.  Your links and comments were fantastic.  The depth of your 
material humbles me about as much as my ego will allow.  Really, thank you!

You might have gathered from my bio that I'm a light weight' when it comes 
to programming skills. Still, I hope I can contribute ideas of 
value.  Besides, there are a whole lot more of us out here than there are 
of you! (And, you need to at least know our perspective).

I was especially interested in your information about "Fetching information 
from the web".  Makes me wish I knew Perl already.  But I don't.  And this 
is close to the point I want to stress:

Like any other religion, one's very own platform of computing knowledge is 
sacrosanct.  Once we neophyte programmers have a set of tools that more or 
less works for us most of the time... we think we are a god. That is, until 
we are forced to use something else.  Then we face a grief stricken 
barrier.  Just like facing the misery of learning another word processor or 
spread sheet, for many of us, learning another language or database is 
worse than suffering through a daily flogging.

I am a self-taught HTML guy. In the early days of Internet, I used to teach 
an introductory class to 30 new students each week with passion, zest and 
zeal.  Why?  HTML was simple, it made sense, and it worked.  No big deal, 
of course.  I mention this only to show you why I quickly gravitated to 
Cold Fusion as my preferred middleware language, since it sported those 
friendly and easiy-to-understand and easy-to-remember  tags, which for me 
became a natural extension of HTML.  And from there I was introduced into 
SQL via the simple, yet powerful interface provided by MS Access.

OK.  So this is my current and rather small programming world.  And since 
Macromedia acquired and extended Cold Fusion, I am somewhat assured that it 
will continue to grow and be well-supported.  MS Access and its bigger, 
more powerful SQL brothers and sisters are not going away anytime soon; nor 
is HTML.  And so far - I can do just about anything I and my clients have 
ever thought about doing with these tools, until I met "her".

Now, I come across this wonderful lady called A.L.I.C.E., and can see how 
her AIML components  can really provide the missing transmission for the 
rest of the vehicle.  In my mind, AIML's real potential comes from easing 
the shifts of concepts from mind to machine and machine to mind.  I believe 
that the key to AIML reaching its full potential now lies in ensuring that 
it can "fit" with all of the other parts easily enough.

So what does that mean?  To me it means that AIML must expand its reach to 
insure that I can use "my"  HTML and "my" middleware language and "my" SQL 
and especially all of "my" current routines.  I must have access to these 
things in a very straight forward manner with minimum additional "thought 
overhead".  It means I must be able to transfer "bot-variable" data to my 
routines, and receive data from my server-side routines and transfer it 
into bot variables at will.  And "sometimes"  I just want to take the 
output that I have previously formatted for the web and use it "just as 
is".  BTW, this need to keep the data output format 'the same' has more to 
do with 'rapid development' requirements than anything else.

If as a developer, I can make these things happen using standard, or near 
standard HTML-like FORM-POST-SUBMIT and FORM-GET-SUBMT command structures 
and interfaces that I am already using, then I am estactic.  If I  can 
somehow get returned ATTRIBUTE-VALUE variable data and transfer it into BOT 
variables using some simple ASSIGN (with default value) statement; and, 
allow standard HTML return data to display "as is", then life would indeed 
be grand!  What I submit to you is that this handful of functionality is 
limited enough, yet powerful and universal enough in scope to more than 
satisfy the 80/20 rule while keeping the interface independent of any 
particular cgi-scripting language.  It is my guess that this is also 
universally deployable over a large pool of "likely-to-be-used" 
interpreters, or lesser interpreters with addon 3rd party Internet I/O modules.

Once a developer buys into the potential of AIML., the first obstacle he 
faces is understanding the basic nature of a category.  The next obstacle 
he faces is how is he going to interface it into his own programming 
world.  The first is what it is. The second is what I have addressed here, 
and what we have the power to make much better.

-gr