41–50 of 94 posts
Remember XML/XSLT? You were supposed to write your webpage in pure XML -- this way the content was pure, and can be indexed, processed by other programs, etc. -- and then styled by XSL transformations. I spent a lot of time learning this. It never caught on. Browsers still support it. http://xml.silmaril.ie/browsers.html
The Gophersphere seems to prosper and I have seen some interest in Project Gemini[0] over on Mastodon in the last weeks. So I guess People are trying and somewhat succeeding. Personally, I am also quite skeptical of the benefits of these approaches. I would like a web more focused on documents, but many of the "forbidden" features these communities define are actually things I was excited about when they were introdu…
WWW eventually pulled out into the lead, due largely to licensing considerations; WWW had been developed at CERN, which explicitly disclaimed any ownership over it, while Gopher had been developed at the University of Minnesota, which preferred to leave its ownership claims ambiguous. People gravitated towards WWW for the simple reason that they knew no one would sue them for using it.
As WWW's userbase grew, demand grew as well to add features to it. Mosaic added images and image maps; Netscape added JavaScript; and on and on and on. Eventually WWW grew to the ginormous, do-it-all system we know and (ahem) love today. Because Gopher had been left behind in adoption, it didn't have those pressures to extend its capabilities; it was free to remain the simple hypertext system it was in the early '90s.
I see a lot of people today point to Gopher as an example of what the Web should be. But this misses the point; the Web isn't what it is because of some design decision it made that Gopher did not, the Web is what it is because it had users. The more users there were, the more things people wanted to do with it; and the more things people wanted to do with it, the more features got tacked on.
If Gopher had been the one with the permissive licensing back in the '90s, it's very possible that it would have been the hypertext system everybody used, and today we'd be complaining about how complex Gopher has become and asking "hey, whatever happened to that toy Tim Berners-Lee was hacking on back in the day? Remember how simple that was?"
Sure, nothing is guaranteed about style, but that doesn't mean, for instance, that tables can't be styled by default and must instead look like a collection of lost strings on the screen.
I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by the bold implementations of DETAILS and SUMMARY, but still, there seems to be some sort of unspoken industry-wide manifesto against this.
Developers can already do this. They can just use HTML. Plain old HTML. They don't have to use JavaScript. They don't have to use CSS. They can just use plain boring HTML. That they can do this now makes me ask the question: what problem are we solving? If people aren't using the existing solution enough, and the existing solution solves the "issues" of CSS and JavaScript being used, then what is the problem?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The projects that SDOs decide to work on are those which people there are willing to spend their time on. An SDO could say "we're doing project X", but if nobody shows up…
Sure, but htmx is small (~1.7K loc[1]), written mostly by one guy part time and, while not perfect, advances HTML significantly as a hypermedia. That something like this hasn't been discussed in a significant, public manner by the w3c in over a decade[2] indicates to me there is either a lack of understanding or of interest in advancing HTML as a hypermedia. I readily admit I may be missing something. [1] - https://g…
W3C isn't interested in advancing HTML as anything and, even if they were, they'd be screaming into the night because none of the people who build browsers are interested in what they have to say. They’ve got their own club, and that's where HTML happens (and WHATWG and the browser vendors don't seem to be interested in pushing functionality into HTML in any big way, they are happy with the basic shape of the existing HTML/CS/JS trinity and don't see a big need to push for standalone HTML as a platform.)
Forking HTML might not make sense indeed, but I think this post doesn't make a compelling point as to why or why not.
The article offers a few reasons but they strike me as weak sauce. > persuading Web developers to use it is where the real problem lies So what? There are various alternative markup formats, like Gemini, Gopher, Finger, Troff (used for Unix man pages), and perhaps we'd also count Markdown, and even RTF. Not every project aims for world domination. Websites interested in being lightweight, already can. HackerNews, Pin…
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 roll…
XHTML2. You just need XML parser for that.
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.
Heck, go back to using WML. It would be interesting to build that browser again, the cards would work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
I worked with some of very first mobile web sites. It was WML and Nokia 7110. While it seems rosy now, it was not that pleasant to work with. Pushing out any meaningful user interaction was painful. It was similar to remote control menus on TVs. Plus it did not help that the entire device rebooted on a markup parsing errors and such bugs.
I suppose, strictly, it did have WMLscript to go with it so might not be suitable for the original author.
I firmly believe truly plain HTML (sans even CSS) would be used more if browsers didn't seem to go out of their ways to make default pages ugly. Every element, down to H6, should be legible by default (even without the proprietary-turned-CSS viewport meta tag). Sure, nothing is guaranteed about style, but that doesn't mean, for instance, that tables can't be styled by default and must instead look like a collection o…