From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Sun Dec 26 1999 - 03:34:26 MST
Michael M. Butler writes:
> 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.
If I define a language which will be used to locally render remote
documents, and I cannot foresee that at some point users will be
clamoring for (among other things) beautiful typography then I'm a
damn fool at best.
> 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.".
All very true, but this is a far too narrow niche to stay in for
long. The guy who specced it didn't think two steps ahead.
> 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!
What is really strange is that most people don't learn from the
past. The earmark of a good design is how good it performs in the area
it wasn't specced for.
> XML as most people envision using it is like the Sherwin-Williams paint can. :)
I wonder what people will eventually do to XML <shudder>.
> 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.
It would be sure nice to have the markup information in a different
part of the document (stripping markup is trivial then). But it would
be essentially impossible to write this in a text editor then.
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