DSSSL looks amazing. Truly a shame it didn't catch on. Maybe we'd have a client-side Lisp instead of Javascript too.
Languages Which Almost Became CSS
11–20 of 136 posts
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#12DSSSL looks amazing. Truly a shame it didn't catch on. Maybe we'd have a client-side Lisp instead of Javascript too.
When I die, my first question to god will be 'sir, why the hate on lisp?'. I expect the answer to involve testing of some kind.
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#13There was also JavaScript Style Sheets: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets
Ha, I'd totally forgotten about that! It seems like I remember Netscape 4 would actually convert CSS into JSS internally. It tried to comply to the standards but it always felt like the internal warts of the engine would poke through in myriad ways. Which was annoying because at Sun we had to make things work in Netscape 4 long after the rest of the world had moved onto IE6 and Mozilla.
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#14I've never understood why you need CSS, I just do it all in VRML
The idea that 3D visualization was being considered in 1994 before CSS was even released is absolutely fascinating, and a testament to how forward-looking early Hypertext proponents were.
Skip down to Marc Andreessen's 'Future capabilities' for Mosaic: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0099.ht...
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#15DSSSL looks amazing. Truly a shame it didn't catch on. Maybe we'd have a client-side Lisp instead of Javascript too.
The engineering management that prevented Scheme in the browser should never be forgiven: https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#16And several years before that, there was Motif Toolkit.
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#17Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#18"HTML is the kind of thing that can only be loved by a computer scientist. Yes, it expresses the underlying structure of a document, but documents are more than just structured text databases; they have visual impact. HTML totally eliminates any visual creativity that a document’s designer might have. — Roy Smith, 1993" Seems like an odd request in 1993. Sure, Prodigy had visual impact, but it was pretty hard to read…
Quite. I strongly dislike sites that cram the article content into 1/3 of the screen, while the other 2/3 is taken up by ads and previews of "relevant" content. Reader mode may well be the best thing to come to Firefox in ages...
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#19DSSSL looks amazing. Truly a shame it didn't catch on. Maybe we'd have a client-side Lisp instead of Javascript too.
When I die, my first question to god will be 'sir, why the hate on lisp?'. I expect the answer to involve testing of some kind.
My take is that metaprogramming does not scale to teams.
Or maybe it's just the historical artifact that everybody claims to be, and if the PDP-10 supported a lisp environment, things would be different. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on metaprogramming not scaling.
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#20"HTML is the kind of thing that can only be loved by a computer scientist. Yes, it expresses the underlying structure of a document, but documents are more than just structured text databases; they have visual impact. HTML totally eliminates any visual creativity that a document’s designer might have. — Roy Smith, 1993" Seems like an odd request in 1993. Sure, Prodigy had visual impact, but it was pretty hard to read…
PDF, TeX, MS Works, and even images with styled text in them were all around in 1993. Edit: I just realized that TeX and Word were mentioned right at the top of the article.