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

On Thu, 30 Aug 2007, Dan Connolly wrote:
> 
> The draft says "HTML was primarily designed as a language for 
> semantically describing scientific documents, ..."
> 
> I'm pretty sure that's not true.

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
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