At 11:15 AM 10/14/2013, Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 07:30:22PM +0200, Adam Back wrote:
Well you should say the web developers regressed since then.
The worst is that the entire trainwreck has been so predictable, right from the start.
If by "right from the start" you're including "back in ~1987, when I was on standards committees that were specifying SGML for their applications", then yes, the trainwreck was around then, even before HTML or the web. "Computer-Aided Logistics Support", aka CALS, was trying to address standards for handling documentation, mainly for the aircraft business and military contractors; you couldn't fit the design and maintenance documentation for a typical cargo airplane into the airplane itself. The people who got the concept wanted to be able to do things like have maintenance manuals that you could read on whatever display you had, whether it's a high-res computer terminal or a monospaced wrist-mounted screen when you were standing on a ladder working on an engine, and you'd have objects like "a 2nd-level header". The people who didn't get it wanted to be able to have data formats that could keep track of page numbers (so you could replicate taking the old page 1435.2 out of a 3-ring binder and replace it with an updated version), and objects like "a line of 14-point bold-faced text." We ended up with some botched DTD that sort of let you do both, badly. Graphics were supposed to be in a portable vector-based format, but they didn't have that finished while I was still working on that committee. And eventually Sir Tim came up with HTML, which was sort of like a simplified DTD that did basic markup mostly correctly (plus hypertext and forms entry!), though with bitmapped pictures, and later people started to botch it up by letting you specify specific fonts and layouts (even if the reader's display didn't look like the author's), and Javascript to try to plaster over the botches, and it's been unsafely downhill from there.