Re: WWW: Interoperability Crisis?

David Meadows <david@heroes.force9.co.uk> wrote:

> First define the objective that HTML is trying to achieve (to make
> scientific documents available on line). Then look at what a scientific
> document *is* and decide how you will achieve that objective.

Thank you David! -- this is the point I was trying to make. HTML is a
language for describing scientific documents. But it doesn't seem to do a
very good job of it...

> HTML, right from its inception, was, according to its stated purpose, a tool
> for displaying multimedia content. It accomplished this task very poorly
> until graphical browsers and the <img> tag came along. And now you want to
> take that away?

IIRC, the original Web browser spawned new windows to do graphics, which was
supposedly a better fit for the on-line world, since you could place the
image on your screen wherever it was needed.

However, it is true that the Web only really took off with Mosaic et al and
the text/image widget.

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Sunday, 21 January 2001 09:54:04 UTC