Re: Future version of HTML!?

--I'm sorry.  I should have said "post-modern" HTML.  The HTML
of the future, where designers, software vendors, and
officials are tuned in to the same station (maybe a few
differences in frequency and amplitude, but still in the same
six-megahetz band).  Again, archaicisms of SGML are being
given prevelance.--

HTML was originally designed as something with which you can organize
information. When people started wanting it to do multimedia, that's where
the problems started. The W3C knows this, and so they're trying to keep HTML
simplified, and let other standards that work hand-in-hand with HTML do the
multimedia instead. On paper, CSS is a pretty good thing. It's a shame that
it hasn't completely been implemented yet, but it has broken down so many
barriers that HTML had, and it does it in a way that is far superior to what
a real markup language could. Let me try to emphasize this in a friendly
way:

Markup is best used for only organizing information, and if you try to make
it a presentational language, it starts to get very big, very cumbersome,
and confusing. To think that I work with a science teacher and a computer
teacher who think that learning HTML is something completely beyond them as
it is would be a "bad thing."

I don't know what all you'll be able to do with XML, as I still don't have a
personal understanding of how it works, but you might be able to implement a
lot of what you'd like to see with it. The problem is, again, poor
implementation in web browsers.

You have to keep one thing in mind: when a new idea is thought up in the
W3C, it may take up to five years before you actually see a web browser that
will actually run this great new idea. By that time, it's an old idea.

I think it's great that you have a spirit to innovate, but I'm sure that
when you see what the W3C is doing with HTML / XHTML and CSS / XSL, you'll
be looking forward to seeing those standards properly implemented. The W3C
really seems to be going after a kind of markup language that is based more
on sheer logic than on learning the quirks of the language. (a <bgsound> tag
would be a quirk)

Good luck,

Daniel

Received on Saturday, 23 October 1999 14:13:29 UTC