5 ms·

From my perspective, the reason to have a language for static documents is parsability. With HTML5+CSS+JS, there are few organizations at the scale which can su

by wegs 6y ago

From my perspective, the reason to have a language for static documents is parsability. With HTML5+CSS+JS, there are few organizations at the scale which can sustain making something like a web browser, a general-purpose web crawler, a11y tools, or similar. Could it be a common language? Perhaps. I liked HTML2. I hated basically everything which went into HTML3 and HTML4. HTML5 has made a lot of good progress on rolling this back, but we're not there yet. It's possible to write parsable HTML5, but most organizations don't do it, and the ones which do don't have common ways to do it. It's hard to remember, but back in the HTML2 days, the web had a certain type of client-side programmatic experimentation which is absent today. Anyone could write a tool which would grab things from the web and do meaningful things with them, and many people did. Google evolved from Altavista, which was a tech demo at DEC. To be clear: The web is a lot more programmatic today in a general sense (client-side browser extensions, AJAX APIs, embedding webkit, etc. etc. etc.), but one part of that flexibility is gone, and it was important.

whereistimbo 6y ago
XHTML2. You just need XML parser for that.
- frenchy 6y ago
  That's vastily oversimplifying things. XHTML2 was a markedly superior language to HTML in a few ways, but you still would have needed to have the same CSS & JS components to interact with an XHTML page.
- wegs 6y ago
  Well, no. As much as I liked SGML back in the days for human-readability, having an SGML/XML/etc. parser is not the problem. The problem is understanding what the document is. Today, much of the web consists of an empty DIV, populated with JavaScript from JSON objects. I can't do anything with that. One step down, I have a structured, semantic document, but the semantics are defined as `class` elements. I can do more with that, but not a lot. With HTML2.0, I couldn't keep much on the web, but it was semantic. I knew what body text was, what a header was, etc. Semantics are defined in the DTD, which is super-nice. HTML5 points a path forward, with elements like `article` and what-not, but it's still got a ways to go before I can understand the content of a page in the way I could with HTML2.0. There's a deep anti-pattern in there, wrapping things in wrappers, but that's a longer story.
earthboundkid 6y ago
I'm not sure why you think the web is less parseable now. HTML5 is well described and it's easy to get a compliant HTML5 parser for whatever language. Back in the day, people were just doing regex. There's a separate issue that a lot of stuff requires JS, but the JS mostly just calls JSON endpoints, so that's easy to scrape. The tricky thing is scraping ASPX sites that jump through a bunch of hoops instead of having a simple backend API.
- bonestormii_ 6y ago
  Oooo well said. One of the first programs I ever wrote was a scraper for such an ASPX site. Parsing state ids and reposting them over and over again... what a joy it was.
  - wegs 6y ago
    Much as an argument confusing World War II Germany with the Holy Roman Empire might be called 'well-said.' You're confusing the early web era with the dot-com boost/bust period. The early web were the era of dozens, perhaps hundreds of competing web browsers which were made possible by simple, well-engineered web standards. Pages were served statically, or with CGI scripts. You had a whole swarm of generic spiders, crawlers, and bots which automated things on the web for you. Anyone could write a web browser, so many people did. The dot-com boom/bust had companies doubling in size every few months, people who could barely code HTML making 6-figure salaries, Netscape imploding, early JavaScript (which, at the time, looked like a high schooler's attempt at a programming language), and web standards with every conceivable ill-thought-out idea grafted in. If one of the first programs you ever wrote was a scraper for an ASPX site, you never saw the elegance of the early days. ASPX came out not just after HTML3, but after HTML4.
    - earthboundkid 6y ago
      If you define early web as pre-1998, then you’re essentially talking about five guys who all had computer science backgrounds. Yes, they were good at their jobs, but it was never going to last. Increasing the number of web developers by 1000x by definition had to drag down their average skill level to the average skill level of the population at large. Most definitions of the early web include the PHP Cambrian explosion because essentially all websites today got their start then and only a few horseshoe crabs sites (mostly the homepages for CS profs!) predating it survive. Gopher sites were also probably really easy to scrape too. ;-)

by wegs 6y ago

whereistimbo 6y ago

XHTML2. You just need XML parser for that.

frenchy 6y ago
That's vastily oversimplifying things. XHTML2 was a markedly superior language to HTML in a few ways, but you still would have needed to have the same CSS & JS components to interact with an XHTML page.
wegs 6y ago
Well, no. As much as I liked SGML back in the days for human-readability, having an SGML/XML/etc. parser is not the problem. The problem is understanding what the document is. Today, much of the web consists of an empty DIV, populated with JavaScript from JSON objects. I can't do anything with that. One step down, I have a structured, semantic document, but the semantics are defined as `class` elements. I can do more with that, but not a lot. With HTML2.0, I couldn't keep much on the web, but it was semantic. I knew what body text was, what a header was, etc. Semantics are defined in the DTD, which is super-nice. HTML5 points a path forward, with elements like `article` and what-not, but it's still got a ways to go before I can understand the content of a page in the way I could with HTML2.0. There's a deep anti-pattern in there, wrapping things in wrappers, but that's a longer story.

earthboundkid 6y ago

I'm not sure why you think the web is less parseable now. HTML5 is well described and it's easy to get a compliant HTML5 parser for whatever language. Back in the day, people were just doing regex. There's a separate issue that a lot of stuff requires JS, but the JS mostly just calls JSON endpoints, so that's easy to scrape. The tricky thing is scraping ASPX sites that jump through a bunch of hoops instead of having a simple backend API.

bonestormii_ 6y ago
Oooo well said. One of the first programs I ever wrote was a scraper for such an ASPX site. Parsing state ids and reposting them over and over again... what a joy it was.
- wegs 6y ago
  Much as an argument confusing World War II Germany with the Holy Roman Empire might be called 'well-said.' You're confusing the early web era with the dot-com boost/bust period. The early web were the era of dozens, perhaps hundreds of competing web browsers which were made possible by simple, well-engineered web standards. Pages were served statically, or with CGI scripts. You had a whole swarm of generic spiders, crawlers, and bots which automated things on the web for you. Anyone could write a web browser, so many people did. The dot-com boom/bust had companies doubling in size every few months, people who could barely code HTML making 6-figure salaries, Netscape imploding, early JavaScript (which, at the time, looked like a high schooler's attempt at a programming language), and web standards with every conceivable ill-thought-out idea grafted in. If one of the first programs you ever wrote was a scraper for an ASPX site, you never saw the elegance of the early days. ASPX came out not just after HTML3, but after HTML4.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    If you define early web as pre-1998, then you’re essentially talking about five guys who all had computer science backgrounds. Yes, they were good at their jobs, but it was never going to last. Increasing the number of web developers by 1000x by definition had to drag down their average skill level to the average skill level of the population at large. Most definitions of the early web include the PHP Cambrian explosion because essentially all websites today got their start then and only a few horseshoe crabs sites (mostly the homepages for CS profs!) predating it survive. Gopher sites were also probably really easy to scrape too. ;-)