Humans writing HTML (was "Better than Dreamweaver")

by Moe Rubenzahl <moe(at)maxim-ic.com>

 Date:  Thu, 11 Jan 2001 13:28:42 -0800
 To:  Freda Lockert <fredalockert(at)clara.co.uk>,
hwg-software(at)hwg.org
 References:  videotron
  todo: View Thread, Original
The talk about whether Dreamweaver and GoLive can produce valid code 
stimulates a side thought people here might find interesting.

HTML inventor Tim Berners-Lee himself said they never really intended 
that people write HTML. They always envisioned that programs would 
write the code:

http://www.oreilly.com/www/info/wj/issue3/tbl-int.html :

>Q. Any surprises at the way people started using the Web?
>
>I was surprised that people were prepared to write HTML. In my 
>initial requirements for this thing, I had assumed, as an absolute 
>pre-condition, that nobody would have to do HTML or deal with URLs. 
>If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL 
>or have to deal with HTML. You're presented with the raw 
>information. You then input more information. So you are linking 
>information to information--like using a word processor. That was a 
>surprise to me--that people were prepared to painstakingly write 
>HTML.
>
>Q. If people didn't have to write HTML, the Web would be different, 
>wouldn't it?
>
>Yes. There'd be more gray material, more material on the fringes of 
>publicizable material. Whereas at the moment, it's still a lot of 
>trouble to publish something. It's not just a question of hitting 
>the save button. Because of that threshold, the only information 
>that's published on the Web is information that's of sufficient 
>value to a large number of people. So World Wide Web sites have 
>tended to be corporate sites, corporations talking to consumers, 
>rather than groups wondering what they're going to have for lunch.
>
>Q. The bi-directionality is missing, because people are writing HTML.
>
>Yes. Writing HTML is like a programming task, it is not a way of 
>expressing your reaction to something you've just read. The result, 
>from the process point of view, is that it's remarkably similar to 
>the paper publishing process, with a great big sequence -- from the 
>idea to the writer to the code to the publisher -- going through the 
>bottleneck of the person who runs the server. The original idea, 
>however, was that it should be totally bottleneck-free, something 
>between people and information.

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