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| Malkovich Mediator v0.2, Malkovich 2000-2005 by Ka-Ping Yee. Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich. | ||||
This little bit of late-night insanity can be yours for the minimal effort of typing any URL into the entry field above (go on, i dare you to try your own home page) and activating the Malkovich! button. If you are lazy like me you can exert even less effort by selecting one of these links instead:
Just head for the New Jersey Turnpike when you've had enough.
For a much more useful mediator, see Crit. Crit provides the Web's first universal public annotation service and it's been up since 1997. Using Crit, you can make an inline annotation on the text of any public web page for others to see. Today, it is still the only way for non-Windows-IE users (e.g. Linux or Netscape users) to make Web annotations.
Or, check out MINSE. MINSE was the first system to provide the Web with universally-accessible mathematical display and representation. It was deployed in 1996 and now, four years later, it's still the only easy way to put math in your Web pages. MINSE makes it easy to type math directly into your HTML, and any visitor can read nicely-rendered math without installing any software.
A mediator is a thingie i invented in 1995 that transforms the Web experience by taking on the functions of both a client and a server to become a man-in-the-middle. Other people have thought of this too and built some interesting mediators over the years (here's a list). I think i was the first to do it but i'm not sure. Some people are calling these things "proxies"; i would prefer to stay away from that term, since the explicit purpose of a mediator is to add value by changing the transmitted information, not to preserve and duplicate it exactly (the latter is the mandate of a proxy, and corresponds to the meaning of the word proxy: "authority to act for another"). IBM has decided to reinvent this technology and give it fancy names like "web browser intelligence" and "transcoding". Whatever.
Mediators can be used to accomplish some very useful things (such as adding mathematical expressions or public annotation to the Web with no user effort). They can also do very silly things... like this one. Some mediator-like services download the entire page before modifying it and presenting it to you, but this one modifies and forwards it to you continuously while it's coming over. Setting up this mediator for the first time only took about ten minutes, starting from some streaming mediation code that i'd already written. That code is part of CritLink, which is available for download at crit.org. Go ahead and have fun with it. (The mediator actually running now is written in C++ for speed, based on a mediation library that forms the core of both Malkovich and Shodouka.)