Date: Sun, 6 Dec 92 22:41:10 -0800 From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen) Message-Id: <9212070641.AA05810@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu> To: Dan Connolly <connolly@pixel.convex.com> Cc: Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch Subject: Re: The spec evolves... In-Reply-To: <9212070355.AA05717@pixel.convex.com> <9212070355.AA05717@pixel.convex.com> Dan Connolly writes: > Very true. I think the A tag is _highly_ overloaded. One click on an > anchor might take you anywhere from the next sentence to somewhere > in New Zealand. This is part of the beauty of HTML and the Web, and should not be abandoned lightly -- complete user-oriented transparency lifts the concept of information up from its physical grounding (network/machine/directory/file) and removes the need to think of it as anything *but* information. Who cares where it comes from, so long as it's there? Granted, better navigation mechanisms are needed to keep track of position and orientation in this kind of environment, but that's always been the case in hypertext -- not a new problem, but one becoming even more ripe for active research. Why not just consider location transparency to be a challenge? > Meanwhile, I think it's time to redesign HTML. I emphatically disagree. With all due respect (and a lot is due) to your efforts with formalizing HTML, it's high time to shoot the engineers and stabilize the product. Widespread success of the current implementation will be the single best reason for further redesign, which can take place well down the road in the form of HTML version 2, after lots of real-life experiences with the current system can be catalogued and analyzed -- something currently lacking. In the meantime, HTML and the Web need to work on becoming entrenched and widely and generally used, or God help us, we're all gonna be using Gopher five years from now. > Python -- I read a bunch of stuff about that a while ago. I wonder > if the Midas language used by the Midaswww browser could be subsumed > by Python. Aside from the pascalish syntax, I think Python is just > what we need: an object oriented language for distributed applications. > I've been hoping GNU smalltalk would mature, but maybe I should > look at Python again. Tony: have you heard of it? These object-oriented toolkits and interpreters and interface builders and so on are all wonderful, but keep in mind that (1) sustained use of interpreters impacts performance; (2) sustained use of any of them impacts long-term viability of systems based on them, particularly when it comes time to start embedding HTML browsing in other tools; and (3) look at the proliferation of different systems already in use and removing all hope of abstracting more than a very small amount of common code (Viola, tk/tcl, Midas, VUIT, NeXT interface builder, etc.). Doesn't it make more sense to just use portable C (or, possibly, C++) and allow others to benefit from and build upon your labors without forcing yet another toolkit/language/interpreter on them, and more often than not forcing them to reinvent the wheel? Marc -- Marc Andreessen Software Development Group National Center for Supercomputing Applications marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu