Re: Spyglass HTML Validator 1.0 Availability

On Thu, 17 Oct 1996 12:43:18 -0600, Paul Prescod wrote:
> That's my point. Five years from now we will have browsers that can
> do whatever "channel" (content type) we want. But right now we only
> have two channels and they are stuck on The Shopping Network and "Fox
> TV".
>
> As I said, I hope Spyglass and others will change that by making
> competitive browsers that show the whole range, or by co-oopting the
> existing browsers (through Java, Active-X, Plugins, whatever) to do
> so.

Five more years of 'The Shopping Network and "Fox TV"' is going to be
very unpleasant.  But if Spyglass (you listening, Murray?), or some
other company, were to make a really useful UA (we all know what we
need, so it doesn't have to be listed here), the segmentation of the
web into distinct communities of users actually advancing the art on
all sides would rapidly accelerate, and life would become better for
all of us.

As Jason O'Brien wrote:
> > I'm talking about multimedia -- there will of course always   
> > be a place for text publishing, and for this, any browser will work
> > -- I don't know where the complaint comes from there.

And Paul Prescod answered:
> That isn't true. The current web browsers are quite _bad_ at
> publishing text, and since that is still the majority of what most of
> us want to *DO* with the web, it is very frustrating. For every site
> that could benefit from shockwave, there are ten that could benefit
> from robust, standardized handling of footnotes, or math, or
> hypertext links, or style sheets, or meta-data, or ...

Paul says it the way it is -- the current UAs are truly primitive in
the way they handle good-quality text documents.  It's like the
difference between a really fine paper presentation of text (Goldfarb's
book from the Oxford University Press comes to mind, sticking close to
the subject :-) vs. some sleezy paperback which can hardly be read even
when new.  There really is a lot more to text presentation and format
than plain ASCII.  It would be nice is something could be done about
this.

-fep

--
fepotts@fepco.com
http://www.fepco.com/

Received on Thursday, 17 October 1996 17:06:40 UTC