| In article <t12pstcedbttqh1d6j8jmbpnl781omm...@4ax.com>,
| Arjun Ray <a...@nmds.com.invalid> wrote:
|> Andrew Glasgow <amg39.REMOVET...@cornell.edu.INVALID> wrote:
|>| In article <j8gnstorvjt4srgoa4gnmi1qso3do0p...@4ax.com>,
|>| Arjun Ray <a...@nmds.com.invalid> wrote:
|>|> Andrew Glasgow <amg39.REMOVET...@cornell.edu.INVALID> wrote:

|> A Tag Soup spec delivered in late '94 or early '95 would have been:
|> able to show a basis in prior implementation and testing; clear, short
|> and understandable in the documentation; open and fair; and timely.
|
| And would suck ass in all the ways that tag soup did, does, and will.

Really?  Would you care to explain why all sorts of people went ape
over Mosaic and Netscape?  Look at item (e) here:

 http://www.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0668.html

[Yes, the "missing years" of the www-talk and www-html lists at
lists.w3.org can be found at www.webhistory.org .]

That was August 93.  In January 94, there was RFC 1563 (note that
there were I-Ds before this date).

  http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1563.html  

Read item 7 in Appendix B.  Now add inline images and simple links,
and you have what Netscape 0.9 effectively had in October 94 to no end
of hosannas and hallelujahs from all around.

Suck ass?  Hindsight is easy, ain't it?

If you want to see what people might have been *missing*, see

 http://www.viola.org/violaIntro.html

The Aug 94 date only reflects editorial changes of a document that was
available in Mar 94 when Viola 3.0 was released.  Here is a directory
of screen dumps - note the earlier date:

ftp://ftp.cuhk.edu.hk/.1/packages/info-systems/www/viola/screenDumps/

Yep: collapsible lists, tables, multicolumn layouts, text flow around
images, scripted applets, you name it.  But noooooo, Mosaic/Netscape -
which had *none* of these, months and months *later* - was the kewlest
thing since sliced bread, verily a "standard" for the herd stampeding
over their chosen bleeding edge.

Suck ass?  Now, why did people justify MarcA's assertion by *choosing*
to suck ass?

History is embarassing, ain't it?

|> as it happens, I don't view "standard" HTML as substantially better.
|> I can't imagine a worse advertisement of Generalized Markup than the
|> caricature of SGML that "official HTML" has always been.
|
| To hell with SGML.  I don't care whether HTML is a "caricature" of
| anything, as long as it works as markup for the WWW.

What works as markup for the WWW is Tag Soup.

|> Tag Soup need not be proprietary crapola, nor is the W3C a guard
|> against that.   People blinded by agendas make the best cats' paws.
|
| Whether or not tag soup is composed of proprietary crap or standard
| tags, it's a bad thing.

Only in that it's a limited paradigm - a dead end, no future.  But!
"Hard work pays off later.  Laziness pays off immediately".  Tag Soup
is *easy*.  Not just for Joe HomePager, but much more importantly, for
the horde of instant expert wannabes.

Vanity, thy name is Web.