There's only one structuring mechanism to handle all the different types of data and documents on the World Wide Web -- hypertext anchors that link to other documents. Although this approach can be used to create menu-like hierarchical structures, Web databases are basically flat-file collections of documents with pointers.
The Web's limitations become apparent when you begin to maintain more than a few hundred Web pages. Here are some major weaknesses:
-- No full-text search mechanism
is built into the Web server, let alone the possibility to search across boundaries of Web servers.
-- Because the Web currently lacks authorization features,
servers are often implemented a
s islands, even within the same organization, to prevent access by unauthorized parties. This defeats the Web's underlying principle of tying information together, and it makes global searches even more difficult.
-- The way hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) operates
on the Web, an object that's located with a given URL may not be accessible at a later time. Moving an object to a different location changes the URL needed to access it. Even worse, a given URL can point to one object at one time and to a different object at another.
-- You can't follow links backward.
This makes it impossible to determine what other documents, even within a single server or Web site, refer to the one that you're about to move or delete. The inevitable result is dangling links.
Why the Web Won't Work
