From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Thu Dec 23 1999 - 14:19:57 MST
I'm very skeptical about the recent proliferation of "standards".
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.
It was not designed that way? Yes, but sooner or later the
functionality would be needed. Anybody with a scintilla of common
sense would have known that. PostScript, being a true language, could
have easily combined speed (display PostScript), beautiful
device-independant typography and color/gfx rendering as well as
hyperlinks. Only think of font embedding. Alternatively, one could
have used Scheme with graphics extensions as powerful as
PostScript's. Because it is a true language, it would have been
possible to expand it into the multimedial domain (3d objects,
animations, streaming video/audio), by specifying hooks for later
expansion. Older browsers lacking functionality could either execute
embedded code or upgrade themselves by reaching into the net and
plucking lacking functionality as run-time compiled code
modules. Security is not an argument if confinement to sandboxes (Java
it is not) and authentication is used.
That spec should have been frozen, and made a canonical format for all
eternity (or however long eternity lasts these days). Every browser
should have to run through a torture test rendering a rich test suite
before being able to be called a browser.
What do we have instead? Browser wars, and the exciting outlook that
nobody will be able to read HTML in a decade, unless he's running
antique software in an emulator.
What's the point in creating content which grows unreadable really
quick?
Bryan Moss writes:
> > I think good search bots will replace the URL field as the
> > standard way of navigating the web.
>
> To expand on this...
>
> With Apache, which is responsible for serving over 50% of
> web pages, now offering support for XML and XSL, Netscape
> and Microsoft servers will have to offer similar support to
> remain competitive. The advantage of XML is that it's
> semantically richer than HTML and therefore makes searching
> more relevant. With XML and XSL support in my web server I
> can serve pages to forthcoming XML-capable browsers and yet
> remain compatible by translating the XML pages to HTML pages
> using XSL. As long as good XML/XSL editors are available I
> can't see a reason why any self-respecting web designer
> would not use XML (admittedly good XML/XSL editors are not
> going to be easy).
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