Humans writing HTML (was "Better than Dreamweaver")
by Moe Rubenzahl <moe(at)maxim-ic.com>
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Date: |
Thu, 11 Jan 2001 13:28:42 -0800 |
To: |
Freda Lockert <fredalockert(at)clara.co.uk>, hwg-software(at)hwg.org |
References: |
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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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