5 ms·

To be honest I could barely make it three paragraphs without wincing at this claptrap. It's overly broad and blatantly inaccurate.

nnethercote 12y ago
I read the whole thing and thought it was excellent. I didn't wince once, and I didn't see anything inaccurate.
- jasonm23 12y ago
  I wince when non-French persons render words such as "èlite" with an accented e. It's typical pretentious New Yorker twaddle. Especially when the elite they are referring to, held no such position of hatred, or features desired. The main issue with HTML was looseness of definition, which has plagued us ever since. Avoiding correctness to benefit those who cannot be bothered to simply follow a prescribed document structure was the greatest error. Editing in a browser page? Pfft, nonsense. Nobody of technical note, gave a fig about such things.
  - ftrain 12y ago
    Tim Berners-Lee advocated for in-browser editing in the early days of the web and saw it as a critical part of the platform. This is documented in his book "Weaving the Web."
tagawa 12y ago
I agree it's aimed at a broad audience (not a bad thing in this case) but could you give an example of what's inaccurate?
- jasonm23 12y ago
  I was being pretty harsh, I'll admit, a bad habit. I was just irked at the opening assertion that "élite hypertext thinkers" and "computer savvy" people despised it. Far from it, they were the only people on it.
  - farnsworth 12y ago
    That's actually true, at least according to Tim Berners-Lee's book. Hypertext was nothing new when the WWW came around and other systems were more powerful.
    - jasonm23 12y ago
      The drama attached to "despised" is not true however, and the features lacking, ie. Editing in a browser or "who has linked to my page" were not of overwhelming concern. The author is simply attributing features which seem personally important to them/journalists, as the most pressing concerns of the people making/using the web at the time (early 90s) I was on Usenet virtually every day keeping an eye on discussions on SGML vs HTML, when the web was in its infancy. Certainly consensus was not always smooth and non-controversial. But to say anyone (who wasn't simply trolling) despised HTML, let alone the "èlite", is utter nonsense.
      - tagawa 12y ago
        Thanks for taking the time to clarify.

nnethercote 12y ago

I read the whole thing and thought it was excellent. I didn't wince once, and I didn't see anything inaccurate.

jasonm23 12y ago
I wince when non-French persons render words such as "èlite" with an accented e. It's typical pretentious New Yorker twaddle. Especially when the elite they are referring to, held no such position of hatred, or features desired. The main issue with HTML was looseness of definition, which has plagued us ever since. Avoiding correctness to benefit those who cannot be bothered to simply follow a prescribed document structure was the greatest error. Editing in a browser page? Pfft, nonsense. Nobody of technical note, gave a fig about such things.
- ftrain 12y ago
  Tim Berners-Lee advocated for in-browser editing in the early days of the web and saw it as a critical part of the platform. This is documented in his book "Weaving the Web."

tagawa 12y ago

I agree it's aimed at a broad audience (not a bad thing in this case) but could you give an example of what's inaccurate?

jasonm23 12y ago
I was being pretty harsh, I'll admit, a bad habit. I was just irked at the opening assertion that "élite hypertext thinkers" and "computer savvy" people despised it. Far from it, they were the only people on it.
- farnsworth 12y ago
  That's actually true, at least according to Tim Berners-Lee's book. Hypertext was nothing new when the WWW came around and other systems were more powerful.
  - jasonm23 12y ago
    The drama attached to "despised" is not true however, and the features lacking, ie. Editing in a browser or "who has linked to my page" were not of overwhelming concern. The author is simply attributing features which seem personally important to them/journalists, as the most pressing concerns of the people making/using the web at the time (early 90s) I was on Usenet virtually every day keeping an eye on discussions on SGML vs HTML, when the web was in its infancy. Certainly consensus was not always smooth and non-controversial. But to say anyone (who wasn't simply trolling) despised HTML, let alone the "èlite", is utter nonsense.
    - tagawa 12y ago
      Thanks for taking the time to clarify.