3 ms·

Somehow, Semantic Web and associated ideas does not seem to have panned out in practice. I wonder whether HTML is the ASCII of the web world - clearly just inte

by sn41 7y ago

Somehow, Semantic Web and associated ideas does not seem to have panned out in practice. I wonder whether HTML is the ASCII of the web world - clearly just intended as a first step and supposed to be obsolete over time, but proving to be a survivor, and a hurdle against future improvements due to wide adoption.

tannhaeuser 7y ago
I think HTML wasn't supposed to become anything - by the time TBL got HTML 0.9 or so out of the door, it was based on SGML which, in turn, was the meta-language invented to capture and evolve all kind of text notations (also covering, for example, Wiki syntaxes such as markdown and MediaWiki used for writing large portions of text we're reading on the web today, even though SGML was intended to generalize ad-hoc syntaxes of older text processing systems). What killed HTML as a representation format covering contemporary digital text was the introduction of CSS (as an arguably unnecessary additional syntax on top of mighty SGML) and JavaScript, and the relative stagnation of HTML in the presence of these other two languages that, once present in the stack, could be used for all the presentational tricks people were asking for. Maybe the problem was also that HTML parsing was hard-coded into browsers and couldn't be changed easily enough in the presence of the first wave of web content at scale around 1993-5. Also, there just wasn't a blueprint how to evolve a language for describing static text into one for "modern UI experiences", so a Turing-complete language had to be used for tinkering until such a time where the idioms for digital text presentation were better understood. IMHO, if anything, the web has stopped at that point, and JavaScript and CSS are hurdles for future improvements rather than the declarative HTML core.

3 ms·

Somehow, Semantic Web and associated ideas does not seem to have panned out in practice. I wonder whether HTML is the ASCII of the web world - clearly just inte

by sn41 7y ago

tannhaeuser 7y ago
I think HTML wasn't supposed to become anything - by the time TBL got HTML 0.9 or so out of the door, it was based on SGML which, in turn, was the meta-language invented to capture and evolve all kind of text notations (also covering, for example, Wiki syntaxes such as markdown and MediaWiki used for writing large portions of text we're reading on the web today, even though SGML was intended to generalize ad-hoc syntaxes of older text processing systems). What killed HTML as a representation format covering contemporary digital text was the introduction of CSS (as an arguably unnecessary additional syntax on top of mighty SGML) and JavaScript, and the relative stagnation of HTML in the presence of these other two languages that, once present in the stack, could be used for all the presentational tricks people were asking for. Maybe the problem was also that HTML parsing was hard-coded into browsers and couldn't be changed easily enough in the presence of the first wave of web content at scale around 1993-5. Also, there just wasn't a blueprint how to evolve a language for describing static text into one for "modern UI experiences", so a Turing-complete language had to be used for tinkering until such a time where the idioms for digital text presentation were better understood. IMHO, if anything, the web has stopped at that point, and JavaScript and CSS are hurdles for future improvements rather than the declarative HTML core.