davidkin hollywood

Thursday, February 21, 2002

Dave Winer writes:
If you had to choose between a plain text weblog that had something to say and one that used all the latest and greatest technology but had nothing to say, which way would you go?
Plain text all the way. But for the designers and web surfers that need or want more than just plain text, I'd prefer well-described and accurately marked-up text (HTML, XHTML, whatever) tranformed by separate stylesheets to the mishmash of tables, font tags, and spacer pixels that describe much of the content on the web today. The real question is not whether Microsoft has us locked in a box -- this may even be true with the web browser and CSS (though the existence of a quasi-standards body like the W3C, and the handful of browsers that support those standards seems to mollify this a bit), but it's not unique, and Microsoft has even deeper entrenchment in applications much more widely used than the Web. You can say "goodbye" today to Internet Explorer and never look back. You really can't do the same if you want to exchange word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations or, in some "corporate" cases, check your email. Unless HTML and CSS somehow get worked into a situation where MS and only MS can use them (I don't see that happening, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise), there's still hope. The real question is whether you can get writers, designers, and browser implementors to think about the web as an integrated hypertext and act accordingly. It seems that most browser makers are approaching this, and even some designers. But the for the vast majority of folks who put up their sites, the rigor required for structuring their document is too much to bear. I think that's why it's up to the people who make the tools for the web to give "the masses" no option but to output web pages, rather than simply online documents. FWIW, as long as I've been reading DW (since I first started playing with Frontier in '95 or '96), just about everything he's done on the web has furthered its founders' more lofty goals. Maybe HTML *is* a dead end -- simply a layout language and nothing more. I guess I'd like to think there's still some steam in the engine to keep going in the direction we're headed, though.
comment 10:51:32 AM