- From: Daniel Hiester <alatus@earthlink.net>
- Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 11:17:01 -0700
- To: <www-html@w3.org>
--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