From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Fri Dec 24 1999 - 12:14:50 MST
HTML was not _at all_ a layout language, originally. It has been forced
into that capacity.
Over and over again. It has become a big warty bag.
The name named it: a _markup_ language. Symbolic and
syntactical--"Emphasize this. That's a title. Here's the body copy.". _NOT_
"gimme 14 point Garamond Italic in three flush-left columns, each
one-quarter-page wide.".
But hackers hacked. And that's the way of it. Most people close to a
subject never see anything wrong with things that can't be fixed by
incremental changes, like painting over the bird poop on a valuable
bronze--hey, that's not bird poop, that's patina!
XML as most people envision using it is like the Sherwin-Williams paint can. :)
Speaking for myself and the Xanadu crowd, the first hideous thing about
HTML is that it is _embedded_, and from this stems many of its
deficiencies. Fortunately, one can envision a system where embedding is
done JIT and people never have to be bothered by it.
Arguing for Eugene for a moment, I daresay that either he or I could code
up all the things you mention in an afternoon or perhaps a weekend in
Postscript, provided we could gain APIs to a half dozen or so system calls.
Hell, Acrobat (which is baby-talk Postscript) does hypertext right now. But
the world has adopted what the world has adopted.
MMB
At 12:36 1999/12/24 -0500, you wrote:
>HTML is not just a layout language. It is also a hypertext language. It
>has hotlinks to other pages, hooks for ftp file transfers, hooks for running
>applets and helper applications, and meta tags for keyword searches and
>contact information. Postscript was not a networking protocol.
>--
>Harvey Newstrom <http://harveynewstrom.com>
>Certified Consultant, Legal Hacker, Engineer, Research Scientist, Author.
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