From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Mon Dec 27 1999 - 14:55:57 MST
You make a good point, but it would have been possible to expand Forth
(or Scheme) by graphic primitives, making it as powerful as PostScript
but keeping enough syntactical distance.
PostScript was insufficiently rigidly defined to be a real platinum
standard for document publishing, anyway. I have a number of documents
(mostly pdf) which break the GhostScript reader (I use
gv). Introduction of PDF was another illustration as to how
for-profits erode standards to create new market niches.
Lee Daniel Crocker writes:
> It should be obvious even to supporters of the IP idea that the
> reason PostScript failed to become more of a standard is that Adobe
> held all the rights tightly in its little claws, while Tim just put
> HTML, warts and all, in the public domain. Yes, PostScript is more
> than capable of specifying text, layout, links, metadata, and all
> the other things a good hypertext system needs. But it never will
> be standard, because it makes no sense to invest time and effort
> in a technology that is tightly controlled when there are free
> alternatives.
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