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HTML started out as a simple language for formatting research papers. It is a tree of text nodes and elements, ie section 1, table 3. It was not and is not inte

by aristus 17y ago

HTML started out as a simple language for formatting research papers. It is a tree of text nodes and elements, ie section 1, table 3. It was not and is not intended to be a 2D anything. Over the last 20 years many people have layered on things for different reasons. The biggest, of course was the "style sheet" which came from the print world. Javascript poked its head in, which prompted an attempt to standardize the DOM without breaking backwards-compatibility. Then the Semantic folk tried to enforce a separation of "meaning" and "styling", which struggle continues to this day.

wicknicks 17y ago
Yeah! This backward compatibility is the devil. I feel that this is the time to flush everything down and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. We can provide support for existing features, but in the right way.
- eklitzke 17y ago
  What's the right way? The appealing thing about HTML is that it's actually rather simple, and it works extremely well for most tasks. Some of the styling rules in CSS are a bit arcane and difficult to master, but in general the CSS box model still feels a lot more simpler than the TeX box model, or the layout model used in many UI toolkits. You want a markup language that satisfies a few simple properties. It should be text-centric, to make it easily searchable, indexable, and accessible. It needs to be easy to write by hand, since people want to be able to write simple pages quickly without using heavy graphical tools. And it needs to be relatively simple to programatically generate, since programatically generated pages are an important part of the web (i.e. pretty much every non-static website). If you think about it, HTML satisfies these requirements fairly well. The fact that some kinds of complex markup are difficult isn't really important enough to counteract the fact that it's structurally simple and really amenable to programmatic manipulation.

by aristus 17y ago

wicknicks 17y ago

Yeah! This backward compatibility is the devil. I feel that this is the time to flush everything down and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. We can provide support for existing features, but in the right way.

eklitzke 17y ago
What's the right way? The appealing thing about HTML is that it's actually rather simple, and it works extremely well for most tasks. Some of the styling rules in CSS are a bit arcane and difficult to master, but in general the CSS box model still feels a lot more simpler than the TeX box model, or the layout model used in many UI toolkits. You want a markup language that satisfies a few simple properties. It should be text-centric, to make it easily searchable, indexable, and accessible. It needs to be easy to write by hand, since people want to be able to write simple pages quickly without using heavy graphical tools. And it needs to be relatively simple to programatically generate, since programatically generated pages are an important part of the web (i.e. pretty much every non-static website). If you think about it, HTML satisfies these requirements fairly well. The fact that some kinds of complex markup are difficult isn't really important enough to counteract the fact that it's structurally simple and really amenable to programmatic manipulation.