History and HTML authoring Re: portals

I don't think this suggests that HTML has failed. The first HTML 
authoring tool was a browser, with WYSIWYG authoring - it was helpful 
that HTML could be written by hand, but I don't think Tim really 
imagined that was how real people would do it.

HTML was a sort of glue format for linking together resources - the 
very early Web had a wide variety of formats in common use, and people 
settled on HTML as a good thing for most documents they put there... 
which turned out mostly a good thing, I think.

The average CMS is essentially an environment for authoring a 
particular kind of content, and the ones I have seen have the benefit 
of being able to handle non-HTML content reasonably well, and the 
drawback of not being very good for HTML unless you like writing code. 
This is not true of them all, of course - some of them do HTML very 
well.

Just my 2cents worth

Cheers

Chaals

On Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, at 22:48 Europe/Zurich, David Woolley wrote:

> The difficulty I always have with the CMS concept is that it is really
> an admission that HTML has failed to achieve one of its primary goals:
> to be an authoring language that ordinary users can use directly.  In
> my understanding of the original web concept, a CMSed page would reduce
> to a list of links to the actual detail pages written by the 
> information
> providers.
>
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Thursday, 9 October 2003 18:24:18 UTC