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The problem with this line of reasoning is: * I cannot, in good conscience, say that image support was a mistake. There is too much valuable work that cannot b
by notriddle 4y ago
The problem with this line of reasoning is:
* I cannot, in good conscience, say that image support was a mistake. There is too much valuable work that cannot be expressed well in text and needs to be graphical. Ditto sound and video.
* Once you’ve added images, you need rich text. If it’s not there, people who insist on doing it anyway will fake it using pictures of text, which is simpler than proper rich text support, but also a lot worse because it doesn’t work with TTS, cannot be indexed for search, and doesn’t work with the clipboard.
The “pictures of text” problem is not just professional designers justifying their paychecks. They’re all over the place on Twitter and Facebook, because of the poor text formatting options they provide.
- eschaton 4y agoI don’t think image, video, or audio support was a mistake. I think CSS and JavaScript and cookies and referers were. The web had rich text even before it had images, in the form of emphasis and strong emphasis, as well as a variety of other forms of semantic markup to indicate document structure and relationships. What I’m saying is that if a web page doesn’t work on NCSA Mosaic from 1994—modulo modern crypto and character sets—it is doing something very wrong. I don’t care that this represents a large proportion of the web today, that doesn’t make it any less wrong.