Re: change "scientific documents" to "basic hypertext" (detailed review of section 1. Introduction)

On Fri, 19 Jun 2009, Marco Neumann wrote:
>
> This 1 Introduction / 1.1 Background paragraph is wrong, misleading and 
> still hasn't been changed
> 
> "HTML was primarily designed as a language for semantically describing 
> scientific documents, ..."
> 
> Please change as requested ASAP into:
> 
>  HTML was primarily designed for basic hypertext, ...

The original proposal:

   http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

...makes it pretty clear that the project was originally intended for CERN 
to manage project documentation. For example, from the second introductory 
section ("Losing Information at CERN"):

   The sort of information we are discussing answers, for example, 
   questions like
    * [...]
    * Which laboratories are included in that project?

That it quickly grew from that humble beginning to a much more generic 
system I have no doubt, but it doesn't seem inaccurate to say that the 
original design was for semantically describing scientific documents.

The "semantically" part may be more debatable though. :-)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 14 July 2009 05:32:26 UTC