RE: WWW: Interoperability Crisis?

> From:	Sean B. Palmer [SMTP:sean@mysterylights.com]
> 
> > So you seem to imply that it's not a language for creating documents,
> > simply linking them together.
> 
> Well, you create the documents and then link them together. It comes from
> HTMLs rocky path of evolution. It was originally a scientific document
	[DJW:]  
	My perception is that it was intended as a language for
	librarians (and secretaries) to provide cataloguing and
	cross-referencing information for base documents in other
	formats (one of the great confusions of the web is that
	the web = HTML).  From what I rememember, and a quick 
	refresh, of the original WWW proposal paper
	<http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal> (NB this has
	an incorrect media type of text/plain, in spite of a
	complaint to webhuman a few months ago - its really
	MS Word or compatible) the concept was much wider than
	scientific papers from before HTML ever existed.

	Moreover, without at least MathML, and probably SVG, 
	HTML really isn't suitable for most science papers.
	(People have made do with images of equations and bit
	map versions of graphs and line art.)

	format, but got evolved into Hyper*Media* Markup Language. But
no-one paid
> any thought with how best to integrate media and HyperText, so they just
	[DJW:]  
	I think that the idea was that it could catalogue multimedia,
	but wouldn't be multimedia itself.  It seems to me that it
	was hijacked, first by people who wanted to play with multimedia,
	then by companies that didn't have a multimedia format of their 
	own.

	Unfortunately, now, the vast majority of authors want a 
	multimedia document format, not the original concept, which
	was trying to distance itself from those.

	This may fail in www-talk.

[DJW:]  

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Received on Monday, 22 January 2001 14:18:44 UTC