Re: The Netscape / Microsoft / Future Quagmire

*my contribution to the rant*

The large problem with adding so many new tags and taking advantage 
of them is that people no longer make good web pages. Everybody just 
uses the tags and makes fairly plain pages.  Some of the nicest 
looking pages on the net can still be done with HTML2.0 (some require 
text/table color extensions, but they are still VERY compatible 
then).  The only useful extensions (over the past year or two) 
I've seen that actually can improve the appearance of a page are
the Text attributes and table cell attributes, both of which are
better replaced with style sheets.

I think too many people want something from the web that shouldn't be 
there.  Comments such as "I want this to look like the newspaper that 
I get in the morning" are very negative to the web.  The web is not 
print medium, it's not video medium, it's not audio medium, it's a 
DIFFERENT medium.  One should just adopt a new approach to design 
rather than trying to force the web into what they already know.  For 
if we do achieve in making web pages the exact same as a magazine on 
the store shelf, we haven't achieved a damn thing!  Great, I spent 
all these years learning computers, making HTML documents, learning 
about the web, just to produce things that have existed for many
centuries already!

 ____
/
|  Imagination's End  I.End@bigpic.com
|  Senior Software Engineer
|  Big Picture Multimedia

Received on Friday, 18 October 1996 17:58:18 UTC