From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Dec 23 1999 - 15:18:05 MST
On Thu, 23 Dec 1999, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> When HTML came out, I thought it was a monumentally bad idea. It was
> not a true language, and it did not offer any typographic features as
> known from TeX and (much better) PostScript.
Could you explain a bit more what you mean by "true language"?
HTML seems to have nouns, verbs and adjectives. What it may
be lacking is variables. In which case, I would only say
it isn't a "programming" language. Now, if you want to look
at "programming" languages for typesetting you have to go *way*
back to ROFF and NROFF. Those did a pretty good job too.
So, the popularity of HTML could only be due to perhaps 3 things
(a) open source -- people could easily extend it
(b) timing -- it got popularized right when the technology was
becoming cheap enough for internet growth & client/server
applications to really take off.
(c) simplicity -- because it had no variables it was easy to learn
Its worth noting that (a) (early UNIX days & GNU) and (b) (client/server
existed since the mid-late '80s in systems like Oracle and Sybase)
had been seen before. That seems to suggest that (c) was the trick
in its popularization.
> What's the point in creating content which grows unreadable really
> quick?
Old content doesn't become "unreadable". Have you thrown out all
of your books? Conversion between languages (even ill-defined
human languages) is becoming easier all the time bacause there
is an ever cheaper amount of processing power available to do the
conversion. What *is* true would be a statement like:
"What's the point of creating content that *looks* really antiquated
really quick?"
For my purposes I've got hundreds of (old) documents that are nothing
but relatively flat HTML because its the *content* and the links that
are important. These documents will always look "flat" because they
aren't cartoons or movies or things that blink or jump around on the
screen. On the other hand I'm not implementing a "purchasing" system
where security, advertising and sales-volume are primary motivators.
Vanilla HTML (with a few enhancements for table formating is enough
for most of my needs), for others is may be very insufficient.
Robert
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