Hand-coding or basket weaving?
Pardon me, flu medication makes me foggy-brained and I'm catching up with existence.
Kendall Clark wrote on XHTML at xml.com:
The Web's success, then, is due in part to the simplicity and generality of HTML. The ongoing success of the Web will be in part a function of maintaining a positive balance between how difficult and how empowering it is to learn XHTML. Some form of HTML, eventually XHTML, will always be the most common type of Web content; people will keep writing it by hand, building user interfaces with it, trying, succeeding, failing to scrape useful information from it, and so on. Any part of the Web's infrastructure with such a long future life cycle deserves careful, attentive, community shepherding.
And from a much earlier article:
In some ways, then, the Semantic Web will reverse the early Web's balance between producers and consumers. HTML was and is simple enough that just about anyone could learn enough of it to publish on the Web. And that was and is a very good thing. It is one of the things which the Semantic Web must never disturb.
I think this is a particularly geeky perspective. I disagree that brevity and typist-friendliness should be important prerequisites to XHTML 2.0. Sure, people will continue to type XHTML by hand, but people who do so are geeks, and by the notion of geekiness, these are the people who should be most able to adapt to technological change. I would have thought it would be more sensible to argue for brevity in terms of document processing size. The smaller the number of bytes, the faster and more efficient it would be to parse.
Having been teaching, and also frequently coming into contact with people who are really in the beginning stages of learning about the Web, I would say that people have a preference for WYSIWYG authoring tools, or other simple solutions for publishing content — why else are publishing services such as LiveJournal so popular? The truth is, only a tiny proportion of the world actually hand-code or have a preference for hand-coding — this is the elite group of people who 1) type fast 2) think geek 3) geekily adaptable (theoretically, at least).
XHTML 2.0 is in a realm where there is a lot of freedom for it to become the language it should be. If it gets really so troublesome to type, what about developing some macros in emacs? We need better authoring tools, not a more handcoder-friendly XHTML.
What made the Web successful doesn't mean that the same criteria will apply in the future. Otherwise, we would still be running steam engines and have to crank up our car to start it every morning. Onwards and upwards, I say.
Posted by sniffles at May 27, 2003 10:57 AM