5 ms·

The last release was in 2012 - I'm curious why this made the HN home page. Am I missing some important news?

• finid 9y ago
  Beats me too. And right there on that page it says It's development is stopped.
• DanBC 9y ago
  It's a nice bit of history.
  • brudgers 9y ago
    I've been thinking some lately about systems that express the idea of programming as an ordinary computer use...systems that don't draw a distinction between users and programmers...systems that don't distinguish between programming them and using them. Earlier today, I was writing a demi-argument in response to a complaint about Windows 10S not having the Linux subsystem based on that idea and how it related to the replacement of "programming" with "development" and part of that reply was enumerating systems that treated "programming" like using. That's when I remembered Amaya which I first stumbled across back in 2007 or so when I was trying to figure out how to build a website for my practice (pretend work that was easier than trying to dig up clients on the cusp of the recession). What is interesting to me is how diverse browsers were in the days before Chrome. The old Opera is another example of what a web browser could be...or could have been.
    • zmix 9y ago
      It could have all been so nice, if X(HT)ML would have found more support on the client side, as well as on the httpd server side. I am thinking about XIncludes, URL-endocded XPath and places like Wikipedia defining their own namespaces.
      • pjmlp 9y ago
        Fully agree, we could have had XAML for the web, instead of the Frankenstein amalgamation some of us have to endure.
        • zmix 9y ago
          You're being sarcastic, no? I am happy, that we do not have a Microsoft format. I'd rather prefer XUL/XHTML.
      • tannhaeuser 9y ago
        You don't need XML/XHTML for structured markup and document-oriented web pages. SGML, on which HTML is based (or was based on originally), and which still can formalize HTML in all its glory [1] (my project), is much more capable and user-oriented than XML anyway. XML was devised as an "easy" subset of SGML to eventually form the basis of HTML, SVG, and other web vocabularies; it just didn't make it into the mainstream web. But that's no reason to give up on formal methods for content engineering alltogether. I can assure you SGML works just fine for the modern web. Now if you mean that web standardization as a community-driven process has come to an end years ago, and has been taken over by Google et. al. in the form of WHATWG, with folks cheering at taking HTML out of the hands of W3C, I agree this is an unsustainable situation given the importance of HTML (though, personally, I also like HTML5 and what WHATWG has been doing). [1]: http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      I suspect that ship has long sailed. The net today has become what the cable box with a modem tried to be, a way to make TV shop a one button interaction. While the net was all about files/documents the idea may still have had a chance. But with the dot-coms came the money, and with the money came the crooks. These days even FOSS projects operate with a sharp delineation between user and programmer. And don't use the term power-user within earshot of them...
      • hilbert42 9y ago
        "But with the dot-coms came the money, and with the money came the crooks." Correct, it's why nowadays I go out of my way to avoid much of it thus have time for more productive things (it's reason for my cynicism in the reply comment re JS further on hereunder). :-)
    • 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
      This post reminded me that Richard Stallman related something like this (an aside in [1], which is mostly about Lisp history from his point of view). > Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program. There's a similar phenomenon with Excel. People will put together amazing things with Excel formulas. Sometimes these things are effectively line-of-business applications. But it wouldn't even occur to them to call themselves programmers. They're just "good with Excel". Many others have also commented on the significance of the 8-bit TV computers booting to a BASIC interpreter rather than something to launch "apps" made by "developers", which I suspect was already part of your exploration. [1] https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html
      • digi_owl 9y ago
        Speaking about booting to basic, i seem to recall that the idea was for the RPi to boot to python or some such. These days it seems to have morphed into a basic ARM Linux computer (not that i am complaining, especially with the likes of Pi-top making laptop and desktop "cases" for them).
  • 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    Exactly. It's an artifact from a time when the grand vision of the Web was to be much more participatory and collaborative, much like how we think of wiki sites today. In those days the goal was emphatically not to create yet another channel for the unidirectional flow of content from producers to consumers.
• gpvos 9y ago
  I'm surprised it lasted that long — I forgot about it way before 2012.