New issue of Joho
Posted on:: February 4th, 2008
I just published the Feb 04, 2008 issue of my (free) newsletter:
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Is the Web different? Is the Web just the next medium in our history of media, or is it a spiritual transformation, the great hope, blah-di-blah-di-blah? Fairness and scarcity: In a world of abundance, fairness is so 1990s. The next future of HTML: The draft of the next version of HTML manages a surprisingly fine balance between the needs of humans and the needs of our computer overlords. |
You said it, I didn’t:
“Realists want to clear away false promises so we can focus on what really needs to be done. Also, they’d like the blowhard utopians to just shut up for a while.”
The opposite of ‘realist’ isn’t ‘utopian’; it’s ‘enthusiast.
if your question is about something just outside a particular domain of knowledge, don’t ask an enthusiast – they’ll tell you there’s nothing there. (Or: there’s something there now, but it won’t be there for long. Or: there’s something there, but look at all the great stuff we’ve got here!)
You are using SGML vs HTML to represent something has a couple more dimensions. I’d characterize it as something like:
strict structure vs loose structure vs presentation
With the addition of the trendy idea that there is also “semantic” markup, some might add semantic as yet another dimension (which might beget further strict-semantic vs loose-semantic distinctions, as well).
But, reducing it down to SGML vs HTML doesn’t work well–for example, it’s specifically SGMLs flexibility that has allowed there to be a FONT tag in HTML. SGML can be used to produce totally presentation oriented markups (e.g., much of HTML)–and, SGMLs. tolerance for user-generated ambiguity is what created the precedent for what’s now considered sloppy HTML markup and buggy browser behavior.
But, as you’re getting at in the piece: most people involved with SGML in the pre-HTML days were so involved with strict-structure / no-presentation markups, that they saw HTML’s presentation-oriented markup as a bad step backwards.
Of course, one also could argue that blogs, RSS, microformats and so-called web standard practices all are popular, in part, because they remedy some of the flaws SGMLers compained would limit HTML.